The Museum of Intangible Things (6 page)

“It’s not going to work anymore, Banana,” Zoe says, reading my mind. She wiggles her bare toes at me.

“Then we’ll think of something else,” I say.

It’s Sunday. I called over, and Zoe’s mom Susan said that she was asleep. It is a deep, worrisome kind of sleep, though. No one is able to rouse her at all. Noah has been climbing on top of her, tickling her nose with a feather, spraying her with a water bottle, to no avail. Susan is keeping close tabs on her. I decide to let her sleep.

I should set up the hot dog cart and try to make some sales, but I do need to think, and I do that best at the lake. So I go to the beach and sit on the bench at the end of the parking lot peninsula. I turn my head toward the sun, close my eyes, and listen to the lake as it laps and licks at the rocks.

I relax, and I try to replay the moment that Danny Spinelli bolted for the stairs at Ethan’s.

Did he really say, “Call me”? Or was I dreaming? I replay it over and over again. “Crap,” he said. “Gotta go.” He was blushing. His legs could have taken the entire staircase in one leap, but he floated up two at a time. He was afraid to get caught with me. And he fled. Taking the steps two at a time, and he said . . .
Call me.

Or maybe he didn’t.

Maybe I wanted him to say that.

I force myself to think about something else. Honestly, in a million years, even if he
had
said, “Call me,” would I do it? No. So it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Zoe is in bed. And I can’t get her to talk about it. That should be my focus.

I try to think of a new cognitive behavioral therapy device (this is what the shrinks call it), like the socks, that will jog her into controlling her moods.

“I didn’t think anyone ever sat on this bench,” says a voice
.

I turn around and jump when I see Danny Spinelli leaning on a piling, his arms crossed in front of him, studying me. His infinite legs are crossed too. I wonder how he can find pants that fit him so well.

“That is one stealthy ice cream truck. I didn’t even hear you,” I manage to say, hoping my voice sounds breathy and ethereal but knowing it is actually nervous and pinched and nasally. “Um. I come here to think,” I tell him.

“What are you thinking about?” He sits down next to me, and we look out at the lake.

“Cognitive behavioral therapy. You?” I actually flip my hair. I wish Zoe could have seen it.

“Whoa. That’s deep. Now I don’t want to say what I was thinking about.”

“What?” I insist.

“Never mind,” he says, blushing. “You should never ask a guy what he’s thinking. Ninety percent of the time he’s thinking of unbuttoning your blouse. The other ten percent is just blank. Or filled with the occasional thoughts about food. But only when we’re already starving and cranky.”

“You’re not giving your gender much credit. I mean, you did get a lot done while you had us enslaved, barefoot, and pregnant for most of history. You had to have had a few other ideas.”

“Nope. That’s pretty much it. It’s pretty motivating.” He nervous-yawns and stretches, wrapping his legs over top of each other and landing his elbow on the seat back. Shy, graceful, and catlike. It’s beautiful, the way he moves.

“I should wear more buttons,” I say with a sigh.

Danny stares down at me, smiling. “What?” he asks me, poking me in the rib.

“Nothing,” I say. I will never wash this rib again. “You kissed me once,” I say.

“I remember.”

“You do?”

“Of course.”

I don’t think he remembers it the way I remember it, though. For me it was a perfect moment.

Somehow, a big group of us ended up at the beach. Boys and girls together. It was a day like today. Crisp but not cold. Sweatshirt weather. Danny’s sweatshirt was red.

A game of Nerf football started, and we ran around like a whirling rainbow of sweatshirts and Converse sneakers, and I caught the ball. Danny, his hands too big for him even then, grabbed me and pulled me onto the autumn’s dying grass. He looked at me, and without hesitation pressed his wet, red lips against mine. It was so instantaneous and unpremeditated. Time stopped. I felt relaxed. Contented. At home in myself. And for a microsecond of eternity, it was like we were in the Garden of Eden.

We had that kiss. And after that, I began to understand the story of Adam and Eve. The falling from grace. It was as if Danny’s impossibly red lips were the apple, and after I kissed them I was never again comfortable inside my own body. Something clamped around my stomach and my throat. I was suddenly ashamed and constantly aware of the fact that I was being watched. I no longer just
did
things; I wondered what I
looked like
while I was doing them.

He smiles, shakes his head as if he were remembering it too and needed to jolt himself back into the present. “Can I buy you an ice cream?” he asks. “I know a place.” He points to the spot in the parking lot where he has left the truck.

“Do you have a Toasted Almond?” I say.

“Whoa, that’s old school. And with all the nut allergies these days, I can’t risk it. I have SpongeBob, or Spider-Man with gumball eyes, or if you want something with actual milk and sugar in it, you’ll have to go for an ice cream sandwich.”

“Perfect. I enjoy ice cream sandwiches.”

Danny gestures in a gentlemanly way for me to walk in front of him. I’m shivering from having dipped my toes into the lake or from suddenly being on a “date” with Danny Spinelli. I shiver again and almost flutter a little like Noah would. Danny wraps his hoodie around my shoulders.

When we get to his truck, he jumps inside and digs around in his deep coolers for an ice cream sandwich. I never realized that there were so many muscles on top of one’s shoulder. They bulge through the soft cotton of his T-shirt as he pushes around his product in search of my old-school ice cream sandwich.

“Okay. Here we go.” He hands it to me, and I unwrap it.

“Want some?” I ask.

“No,” he says, leaning his forearms on the edge of the service window.

I’m proud of myself for taking a small girly bite and not wielding my tongue around the edges, which is what I would normally do. A speedboat buzzes like an annoying insect across the lake.

“Remember the story of the guy . . .”

“Yeah,” I say. I don’t need him to finish it. There was the story about the guy who was decapitated during the annual speedboat regatta. He flipped his boat at 200 mph, fell out, got run over by another boat, and was left with his head bobbing and floating in the water like a cantaloupe. There was also the one about the guy who fell through the ice in his snowmobile and the one about the girl who wandered home alone from the carnival and got murdered in the woods. And the legend of the hopefully vegetarian sea monster that had the head of a moose and the wrinkled gray body of an elephant. Small-town, lake-country lore designed to keep kids terrified and on land and close to home.

He unwraps a Bomb Pop, and we walk together along the beach letting the edge of the water slip beneath our sneakers.

He smiles at me, feeling the same elation I am, I can tell. I can tell because the feeling hangs between us like a rope. When you share a feeling with someone it takes on matter and weight. Even if you’re the only ones who can sense it, it becomes a tangible thing with properties like shape and weight and heat.

“You like it here,” Danny says. “On the lake.”

“I guess. It feels like part of my body,” I say. “It’s hard to explain. Leaving would feel like an amputation in a way.”

“But it would be cutting off the part that hurts,” Danny says, throwing a rock into the water.

“Exactly,” I say. He gets me. “But I would still miss it.”

“Want to see
my
favorite place to think?”

“Sure,” I say.

The old playground by the beach has not been updated since the seventies. It’s still made of metal and cement, so kids can still scrape their precious knees and get a few stitches, which is good for them, I think. Sometimes being poor is good. You learn coping skills.

“This is it,” says Danny, and he points at an enormous scratchy cement tube some construction workers thought would make a good play structure along with some old tires and splintery railroad ties. It’s tagged with a red spray-paint heart. He crawls in and sits down, puts his feet up on one side of the tube, and bends his legs into his chest. “I don’t really fit as well as I used to. Come on in,” he says.

I hate myself for doing it, but I
Seventeen
magazinerize this moment:

When a guy asks you to join him inside an enormous cement pipe with no one else around, do you: A. Crawl in next to him, ignoring the fact that he has a girlfriend. B. Tell him you have to go. C. Call the police.

I’ve been waiting for this moment for six years, so I choose A. His enormous feet are straddling a window-like hole in the cement that perfectly frames the pale disc of the sun. My athletic left quadriceps is grazing his, and I think I might spontaneously combust. Luckily it’s cool inside the pipe, so I feel the blush on my face turn from fuchsia to carnation pink.

“See how it blocks out the outside world?”

It is silent. The constant chatter of the universe is finally quiet for once. I take a deep breath and remember what that feels like. Breath. It seems like I’ve been holding mine for a long time.

Danny places his hand on the knee of my brown corduroys and traces my patella in wide concentric orbits. I put my hand on top of his, and he flips it over, using that magic index finger to follow the lines inside my palm.

“You read palms?” I ask him.

“Indeed,” he says. He brings my palm closer to his face and shakes his head,
tsk
ing.

“What?” I ask.

“You are a hard worker,” he says, tracing a line at the inside of my wrist.

Like sands through an hourglass, my insides are draining through my core.

“That’s what I like about you,” he continues. “You try. Not everyone is like that.” His hand finds the waistband of my sweatshirt and moves up beneath it. I am not wearing a bra.

“That’s not my palm,” I tell him.

“Don’t worry, it’s part of the process,” he says.

“Really,” I say. “I’m suspicious.”

He leans his long torso over and kisses me then, pressing his lips softly against mine, taking gentle nip-like kisses until I open my mouth.

I am immediately in love with him. As if touching tongues was the final step in some ancient magic ritual.

I try to think of Zoe stuck in bed, her hair matted against her face, or my dad drinking at the end of the bar, or Rebecca Forman’s bad teeth. I think of her posse of cheerleader friends who wouldn’t be afraid to beat the crap out of me. That does it, and I break away, remembering to suck in a little like Zoe taught me. The sign of an expert kisser.

“I have to go,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says, and I love him even more for not pressing the issue. His lips are wet and red and glossy. His cheeks are flushed. And he looks at me, shaking his head like he doesn’t know what to do with me. He likes me, I think, but I push it out of my mind.

We crawl out of the pipe, and walk back to my bench. A pair of mallards flies low and furiously over the surface of the lake.

“They mate for life, you know,” Danny says.

“Because their lives are short,” I quip.

“You’re a glass-is-half-empty kind of girl, aren’t you?”

“No, not really. I just like surprises, so I keep my expectations low.”

He seems to think for a moment and then says, “The difference is subtle.”

Zoeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
, I text.

But she doesn’t respond.

She won’t pick up her phone. It’s killing me.

There is such a thing as a shy extrovert. People think extroverts are all loud and mouthy, like Rebecca Forman, but that’s not true. The definitions of
extrovert
and
introvert
have to do with how you process the world and from where you draw your energy. I’m shy, but I process my world by talking about it. Which makes me an extrovert. But I don’t talk about it with just anyone. I have to talk about it with Zoe.

Zoeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
, I text again.

My retelling of events to Zoe is what grounds them, shapes them, makes them real. If I can’t tell Zoe about kissing Danny Spinelli, it didn’t happen.

I call her mom to find out what’s going on.

“Susan,” I say.

“Hannah.”

“What’s going on?”

“Well.”

“Well, what?”

“Well. She promised to let me watch her for a week. If she doesn’t get better, we’re going to the hospital.”

“So it’s like an S-word watch?” We never say the word
suicide
out loud.

“No. We’re not there yet.”

“So it’s like a what?”

“Just a watch. I’m watching her.” Susan had quit smoking years ago, but I hear her exhale what can only be cigarette smoke from the side of her mouth, then I hear some
tamp-tamp
ing into what must be an ashtray. I trust Zoe’s mom because she’s a nurse and she sees so much
humanity
on a daily basis. She usually understands people, especially people in crisis, and knows what to do about it.

“Should I come over?”

“Why don’t we let her rest?”

“Okay . . .”

“Don’t think I forgot about the fact that you two took Noah to a party. I’m going to visit that at a more appropriate time.”

“Okay,” I say, and I hang up.

For that entire week Zoe is on lockdown and doesn’t even go to school. I text her, but she doesn’t answer.

So for an entire week, I worry about her. And without her counsel, I have to pretend I didn’t kiss Danny Spinelli. I avoid him, sneaking through the halls and eating my lunch in the library, because I don’t know what to say to him.

For an entire week, I sneak alone to the attic at Sussex Country Day. (The secretary notices me, but she turns a blind eye.) She and my mom used to play bridge. I learn the conditional past tense in Spanish and how to find the volume of a curve when you rotate it around its axis. Two things I will never use. I watch Ethan Drysdale stare catatonically at the whiteboard. He doesn’t remove his sunglasses. Which would never fly in public school. And he doodles in his notebook, what seem to be large storm clouds and crooked flashes of lightning.

I go alone to sell the hot dogs, reading in my chaise lounge as the
whoosh
of the highway relaxes me and covers me in gray dust.

I go alone to my father-who-is-back-on-the-wagon’s AA meetings, and I whisper the Serenity Prayer along with the drunks.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

I try to be supportive, wearing my
EASY DOES IT, ONE DAY AT A TIME
T-shirts and making random Crown Royal sweeps through his cupboards and filling his refrigerator with fresh vegetables and grapefruit juice (a natural detoxifier).

I learn to accept my fate. Accept the things I cannot change. For a whole week, my life is pretty calm, the way I like it. Huddled among the soft weeping of old men in the dark basements of churches.

And then on the seventh day, I go to Zoe’s house. It’s Friday morning.

I go into her room, and she’s still in bed. The dreadful black poppies of the mock-Marimekko comforter, which she made herself, wrap around her body, as if strangling her. Her feet, still bare, stick out from the bottom.

I walk to her side and lift her limp arm off the bed. Gravity pulls it back to the mattress.

“Zoe. Get up,” I say, but she won’t budge.

“Draw me a picture,” she mutters into her pillow.

“Of what?” I ask.

“Of why I should get out of bed.”

She’s made bedroom furniture out of found objects like milk crates and button boxes. Underneath a table made out of a stop sign, I find some printer paper and a Sharpie. I begin to draw.

“Don’t do flowers and rainbows.”

I crumple up the paper and get another one. This time I draw a huge rippling staff of music filled with notes and an electric guitar.

“What’s that?”

“Music.”

“That’s enough.”

“That’s enough drawing?”

“No, that’s enough to live for. Music.”

“See? Then get up.”

“I just need five more minutes,” she says, and she rolls back over.

“Zoe . . . Zo,” I say, but she’s already fallen back to sleep.

• • •

I go back to the front door. Noah’s on the stoop reading when I ask him how he is.

Without looking up from his book, he says, “You know I can’t answer that question, so why do you ask it, Hannah? I can answer where I am, and who I am, and what I am doing, but I cannot answer the question how I am.”

“I want you to know that Zoe’ll get up soon, okay?” I say, as I hug him close and muss his straight hair a little. “Because whether you know it or not, you are probably feeling frightened by the party, and lonely without Zoe to take you to school. You probably miss your routine, and I want you to know it will all fall back into place. Okay?”

“What I feel without Zoe is lonely?”

“Yes.”

“What is it that I feel for you right now because you told me that?”

“Gratitude, perhaps. Or friendship.”

“Is friendship a feeling?”

“Not necessarily. I guess what you feel for friends is a special love.”

“Does not compute,” Noah says in his robot voice, and he lets out a rare Noah giggle and smile.

I start to get up to go, and he holds out his hand to stop me. “Will you bring me to school, Hannah?”

“Where is your mom, buddy?”

“She’s crying a lot because of Zoe. Sadness-slash-despair again,” he sighs.

“I’ll take you,” I say. I yell into the screen door that I have Noah. I hear Susan blow her nose, and then she yells, “Thank you, Hannah.”

“And don’t do anything rash,” I yell. “Zoe will be fine.” I’m not sure about this, but I don’t want her sticking Zoe in the hospital again.

“I’m giving it one more day,” she says.

• • •

Taking Noah to school is not part of my routine, and I begin to feel the agitation, a tingling in my hands and feet and my chest closing up like a vault, that happens when I veer from my habitual schedule. I don’t have time to stop at the corner store for my corn muffin. I don’t have time to take the long way past Danny Spinelli’s house. I won’t have time to give my first-period homework a once-over. I won’t have time to park in my regular parking spot.

This makes me a little testy with Noah. But he can’t pick up on it anyway and continues to speak at me about the different categories of star.

“Okay, I’m going to quiz you now. What color star is the hottest?”

I haven’t been listening, but I try, “Blue.”

“Good job,” he says, and luckily we pull up to his school before he can ask me another question.

He opens the door and flutters out of it before I can say, “Have a nice day,” and before he can close the door, Danny Spinelli grabs the top corner of it and holds it open. He has a little sister Noah’s age, and he must have been dropping her off.

“May I?” Danny asks as he slips into the passenger seat and slams the door.

“You already have,” I say. His knees fold up almost into his armpits, so I show him how to pull up the lever and send the seat back.

“You’ve been avoiding me. Want to go for a ride?”

“Now?”

“Yeah. No one cares if I miss school as long as I’m back for practice.”

My palms are freezing and sweaty at the same time, and my stomach twists and cramps. These are not cute physical manifestations of first love but, sadly, my anxiety about missing a day of school. I never have missed a day of school. Even when people seemed to stop keeping track of attendance, I continued to show up every day. “I can’t miss school,” I tell him.

“Why?” he asks.

“I just can’t. It’s a thing with me.”

“Can I talk you down?”

“You can try.”

“Okay, so relax your grip on the steering wheel and take a deep breath in through your nose. Good. Now, slowly release the breath as if you’re blowing through a straw . . . We are going to miss school today, Hannah.” The timbre of his voice vibrates at my center, and I relax for a second, but when I hear “miss school,” I tighten my grip again, and my shoulders hunch up toward my ears.

“Boy, this is harder than I thought,” he says.

“It’s a personal goal of mine,” I say. “Perfect attendance.”

“Perfect should never be a goal. Perfect just happens if you let it.”

“Whoa.”

“You learn that from sports. Perfect happens only if you get out of its way. So what time do you need to be there for it to count as a full day?”

“Ten,” I say.

“That gives us plenty of time.”

“For what?”

“Turn left. Take 206,” he says.

On the drive through other country parts of New Jersey, horse farms and rolling hills and woodsy big estates, I wonder what the hell happened to make him suddenly so interested in me. There must be a rumor circulating that I gave someone a blow job. That’s the only way I can possibly explain it. It’s a perfect linear equation.
FALSE BLOWJOB RUMOR = SUDDEN UNEXPLAINED ATTENTION FROM BOYS.

“So is there a rumor circulating about me?”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Well, you and I don’t usually hang out,” I answer.

“Yeah. I’m trying to change that.”

“Why? What about Rebecca?”

“I’m tired of them.”

“Who?”

“
Everyone
. You know, that’s the word they use to describe themselves. They consider themselves
everyone.
‘Everyone’s meeting at the beach.’ ‘Meet us at the mall. Everyone is going to be there.’ Everyone who matters in their universe.”

“I’m not part of everyone?”

“Not usually, no. That’s what I like about you.”

“That’s what you like about me now. Until you start to miss ‘everyone.’” I don’t even ask if he’s broken up with her. Somehow I don’t feel like I have the right. Like it’s none of my business. Because I could never understand what they have together.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Try to discredit what I’m saying to you. You have to know that I’ve always liked you. Since second grade when we sat across from each other and you taught me that trick about the nine times table and you let me copy your answers.”

“I just wanted to help.”

“And that’s what I like about you.”

“That’s not very romantic. Those are the same feelings you have for a preschool teacher.”

“Stop. Pull over. We can be real with each other. You and I are, as they say, cut from the same cloth.”

“Aren’t you and Rebecca ‘cut from the same cloth’?”

“I think what we had has run its course. We’re bored with each other.”

“And so you’ve set your sights on me? I’m not the most exciting person in the universe. I sell hot dogs.”

“You’re going to make me prove this to you, aren’t you? Look at me. You are one of the hottest girls in school. And you’re smart and ambitious and kind. Which none of those others are. You are the only girl worth pursuing. And that’s why no one pursues you. You, Hannah Rose Morgan, are intimidating. These losers know they could never live up to what you deserve. And the only reason you don’t know how physically beautiful you are is because you’re always standing next to Zoe. Who, granted, is hot as hell, but she is not relationship material.”

“Watch it. That’s my best friend,” I say. I’m smiling, incredulously. Does he really expect me to believe that I have no boyfriend because I’m too good for “everyone”? I look him in the eye and shake my head.

“You don’t believe me.”

“No,” I say.

“Fine. You forced me to do this,” he says. “We’re sitting here in a gas station parking lot at eight thirty in the morning, and just the idea of being next to you in a car has done this.” He reaches over, grabs my unmanicured hand, and places it on top of the button fly of his extra-tall boot-cut jeans.

The thing beneath it is rock hard, alive, and insistent. I pull my hand away quickly and giggle. “That seems happy to see me,” I say.

“It is.”

“From what I’ve read, though, seventeen-year-old male parts are happy to see anyone. Or it could happen just from driving over a bumpy road.”

“What have you been reading?” He laughs. “That’s fourteen-year-old male parts. Seventeen-year-olds begin to discriminate. I like you, okay?”

“I like you too.”

“Really?” he says.

“Always have.”

“Okay,” he says back, and when he smiles, his eyes crinkle up a little on the sides. It is so adorable, I want to spend the rest of my entire life trying to make him smile. We drive about three more country miles until he directs me to a remote, hilly, and abandoned driving range with Canadian geese grazing among white clusters of far-off jettisoned golf balls.

“I never fancied you a golfer,” I tell him.

“I’m terrible at it. But of all the sports on the planet, it’s the best at teaching you to get out of your own way. To find perfection by quieting your mind.”

“Ha. Sport. Golf is not a sport.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If ninety-year-old ladies can play it, it’s a game. Like shuffleboard. Or pinochle.”

He stares at me for a second and smiles. The crinkling happens again, and I am rubbery. How is this happening to me? For a second I think of Zoe and wonder if she’s gotten out of bed. I think of telling Danny about it, but I want to stay positive. That’s what she would tell me to do. I forcefully push Zoe out of my mind so that I can hit golf balls with Danny Spinelli while we’re supposed to be at school. I know how to hit a golf ball. So I have to decide whether I let him show me or whether I try to impress him. A difficult choice. But then I think maybe I can do both.