19 Love Songs Read online

  “Yeah, but I still fucked it up.”

  “And we still won,” Damien said.

  Yeah, I knew that.

  But I wasn’t feeling it.

  * * *

  —

  Damien and Wes tried to cheer me up. Not just by getting my burger and shake for me, but by sitting across from me and treating me like a friend.

  “So how does it feel to be the Quiz Bowl Antichrist?” Damien asked in a mock-sportscaster voice, holding an invisible microphone out for my reply.

  “Well, as James D. Watson said, I’m the motherfuckin’ princess. All other quiz bowlers shall bow down to me. Because you know what?”

  “What?” Damien and Wes both asked.

  “One of these days, I’m going to be the goddamn answer to a quiz bowl question.”

  “Yeah,” Wes said. “ ‘What quiz bowl alternate murdered his team captain in the semifinals and later wrote a book, Among Boring People?’ ”

  Damien shook his head. “Not funny. There will be no murder tonight or tomorrow.”

  “Do you realize, if we win this thing, it’s going to come up on Google Search for the rest of our lives?” I said.

  “Let’s wear masks in the photo,” Wes suggested.

  “I’ll be Michelangelo. You can be Donatello.”

  And it went on like this for a while. Damien stopped talking and watched me and Wes going back and forth. I was talking, but mostly I was watching him back. The green-blue of his eyes. The side of his neck. The curl of hair that dangled over the left corner of his forehead. No matter where I looked, there was something to see.

  I didn’t have any control over it. Something inside of me was shifting. Everything I’d refused to articulate was starting to spell itself out. Not as knowledge, but as the impulse beneath the knowledge. I knew I wanted to be with him, and I was also starting to feel why. He was a reason I was here. He was a reason it mattered.

  I was talking to Wes, but really I was talking to Damien through what I was saying to Wes. I wanted him to find me entertaining. I wanted him to find me interesting. I wanted him to find me.

  We were done pretty quickly, and before I knew it, we were walking back to the Westin. Once we got to the lobby, Wes magically decided to head back to our room until the “scrimmage” at eight. That left Damien and me with two hours and nothing to do.

  “Why don’t we go to my room?” Damien suggested.

  I didn’t argue. I started to feel nervous—unreasonably nervous. We were just two friends going to a room. There wasn’t anything else to it. And yet…he hadn’t mentioned watching TV, and last time he’d said, “Why don’t we go to my room to watch TV?”

  “I’m glad it’s just the two of us,” I ventured.

  “Yeah, me too,” Damien said.

  We rode the elevator in silence and walked down the hallway in silence. When we got to his door, he swiped his electronic key in the lock and got a green light on the first try. I could never manage to do that.

  “After you,” he said, opening the door and gesturing me in.

  I walked forward, down the small hallway, turning toward the beds. And that’s when I realized—there was someone in the room. And it was Sung. And he was on his bed. And he wasn’t wearing his jacket. Or a shirt. And he was moaning a little.

  I thought we’d caught him jerking off. I couldn’t help it—I burst out laughing. And that’s what made him notice we were in the room. He jumped and turned around, and I realized Frances was in the bed with him, shirt also off, but bra still on.

  It was all so messed up that I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears were coming to my eyes.

  “Get out!” Sung yelled.

  “I’m sorry, Frances,” I said between laughing fits. “I’m so sorry.”

  “GET OUT!” Sung screamed again, standing up now. Thank God he still had his pants on. “YOU ARE THE DEVIL. THE DEVIL!”

  “I prefer Antichrist,” I told him.

  “THE DEVIL!”

  “THE DEVIL!” I mimicked back.

  I felt Damien’s hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

  “This is so pathetic,” I said. “Sung, man, you’re pathetic.”

  Sung lunged forward then, and Damien stepped in between us.

  “Go,” Damien told me. “Now.”

  I was laughing again, so I apologized to Frances again, then I pulled myself into the hallway.

  Damien came out a few seconds later and closed the door behind us.

  “Holy shit!” I said.

  “Stop it,” Damien said. “Enough.”

  “Enough?” I laughed again. “I haven’t even started.”

  Damien shook his head. “You’re cold, man,” he said. “I can’t believe how cold you are.”

  “What?” I asked. “You don’t find this funny?”

  “You have no heart.”

  This sobered me up pretty quickly. “How can you say that?” I asked. “How can you, of all people, say that?”

  “What does that mean? Me, of all people?”

  He’d gotten me.

  “Alec?”

  “I don’t know!” I shouted. “Okay? I don’t know.”

  This sounded like the truth, but it was feeling less than that. I knew. Or I was starting to know.

  “I do have a heart,” I said. But I stopped there.

  I could feel it all coming apart. The collapse of all those invisible plans, the appearance of all those hidden thoughts.

  I bolted. I left him right there in the hallway. I didn’t wait for the elevator—I hit the emergency stairs. I ran like I was the one on the cross-country team, even when I heard him following me.

  “Don’t!” I yelled back at him.

  I got to my floor and ran to my room. The card wouldn’t work the first time, and I nervously looked at the stairway exit, waiting for him to show up. But he must’ve stopped. He must’ve heard. I got the key through the second time.

  Wes was on his bed, reading a comic.

  “You’re back early,” he said, not looking up.

  I couldn’t say a thing. There was a knock on the door. Damien calling out my name.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said. “Please, don’t answer it.”

  I locked myself in the bathroom. I stared at the mirror.

  I heard Wes murmur something to Damien through the door without opening it. Then he was at the bathroom door.

  “Alec? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, but my voice was soggy coming out of my throat.

  “Open up.”

  I couldn’t. I sat on the lip of the tub, breathing in, breathing out. I remembered the look on Sung’s face and started to laugh. Then I thought of Frances lying there and felt sad. I wondered if I really didn’t have a heart.

  “Alec,” Wes said again, gently. “Come on.”

  I waited until he walked off. Then I opened the door and went into the bedroom. He was back on his bed, but he hadn’t picked up the comic. He was sitting at the edge, waiting for me.

  I told him what had happened. Not the part about Damien, at first, but the part about Sung and Frances. He didn’t laugh, and neither did I. Then I told him Damien’s reaction to my reaction, without going into what was underneath.

  “Do you think I’m cold?” I asked him. “Really—am I?”

  “You’re not cold,” he said. “You’re just so angry.”

  I must’ve looked surprised by this. He went on.

  “You can be a total prick, Alec. There’s nothing wrong with that—all of us can be total pricks. We like to think that just because we’re geeks, we can’t be assholes. But we can be. Most of the time, though, it’s not coming from meanness or coldness. It’s coming from anger. Or sadness. I mean, I see people like me and I just want to rip them apa
rt.”

  “But why do I want to rip Sung apart?”

  “I don’t know. Because he’s a prick, too. And maybe you feel if you rip apart the quiz bowl geek, no one will think of you as a quiz bowl geek.”

  “But I’m not a quiz bowl geek!”

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Wes asked. “Nobody’s a quiz bowl geek. We’re all just people. And you’re right—what we do here has no redeeming social value whatsoever. But it can be an interesting way to pass the time.”

  I sat down on my bed, facing Wes so that our knees almost touched.

  “I’m not a very happy person,” I told him. “But sometimes I can trick myself into thinking I am.”

  “And where does Damien fit into all this, if I may ask?”

  I shook my head. “I really have no idea. I’m still figuring it out.”

  “You know he likes girls?”

  “I said, I’m still figuring it out.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I paused, realizing what had just been said.

  “Is it that obvious?” I asked Wes.

  “Only to me,” he said.

  It would take me another three months to understand why.

  “Meanwhile,” he went on, “Sung and Frances.”

  “Holy shit, right?”

  “Yeah, holy shit. And you know the worst part?”

  “I can’t imagine what’s worse than seeing it with my own eyes.”

  “Gordon is totally in love with Frances.”

  “No!”

  “Yup. I wouldn’t miss practice tonight for all the money in the world.”

  * * *

  —

  We all showed up. Mr. Phillips could sense there was some tension in the room, but he truly had no idea.

  Frances was wearing Sung’s varsity jacket. And suddenly I didn’t mind it so much.

  Gordon glared at Sung.

  Sung glared at me.

  I avoided Damien’s eyes.

  When I looked at Wes, he made me feel like I might be worth saving.

  * * *

  —

  Amazingly enough, during practice we were back in fighting form, as if nothing had happened. I felt like I could admit to myself how much I wanted to win. And not just that, how much I wanted our team to win. More for Wes and Frances and Gordon and Damien than anything else.

  After we were done, Damien asked me if we could talk for a minute. Everyone else headed back to their rooms and we went down to the lobby. Other quiz bowl groups were swarming around; those that hadn’t made the semifinals were taking the night for what it was—a time when, for a brief pause in their high school lives, they were free from any pressure or care.

  “I’m sorry,” Damien said to me. “I was completely off base.”

  “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have been so mean to Sung and Frances. I should’ve just left.”

  We sat there next to each other on a lime-green couch in a hotel lobby that meant nothing to us. He wouldn’t look at me. I wouldn’t look at him.

  “I don’t know why I did that,” he said. “Reacted that way.”

  It would take him another four months to figure it out. It would be a little too late, but he’d figure it out anyway.

  * * *

  —

  We lost in the semifinals to Iowa. I knew from the look Sung gave me afterward that he would blame me for this loss for the rest of his life. Not because I missed the questions—and I did get two wrong. But for destroying his own invisible plans.

  * * *

  —

  Looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever hated any piece of clothing as much as I hated Sung’s varsity jacket for those few weeks. You can’t hate something that much unless you hate yourself equally as much. Not in that kind of way.

  It was, I guess, Wes who taught me that. Later, when we were back home and trying to articulate ourselves better, I’d ask him how he’d known so much more than I had.

  “Because I read, stupid” would be his answer.

  * * *

  —

  We lost in the semifinals, but the local paper took our picture anyway. Sung looks serious and aggrieved. Gordon looks awkward. Frances looks calm. Damien looks oblivious. And Wes and me?

  We look like we’re in on our own joke.

  In other words, happy.

  TRACK TWO

  Day 2934

  When I am eight, Valentine’s Day is a Sunday. There is no certain minute I have to wake up, no bus to catch, no homework that needs to be handed in. Sleeping can blur itself into waking, and that is exactly what it does.

  I wake up with my face against Yoda’s, my arm gently across Obi-Wan Kenobi. I take in the Star Wars sheets, the Star Wars blanket, the lightsaber lamp beside my bed. I have never seen any of the Star Wars movies, so this is all very strange to me. As I sit up in bed against a robot I will later learn to call a droid, I do my mental morning exercise, figuring out that my name is Jason today and that this is my bedroom. My mother’s room is on the other side of the wall; from the silence, I assume she’s still sleeping.

  I know it’s Valentine’s Day because yesterday was the day before Valentine’s Day. I watched yesterday’s sister decorating her cards, putting extra glitter on the one belonging to her crush. She let me put stickers on the cards she cared less about, hearts I laid out in haphazard trails. I tried to imagine each kid opening his or her envelope, knowing full well I would be gone by the time they were delivered.

  Now I get up and walk to the mirror. I don’t really pay attention to what I look like, but I do stare for a good long time at the pattern on my pajamas. If you’ve never seen Wookiees dancing before, it’s a very confusing sight.

  On my desk, I find a dozen sealed white envelopes, each the size of a playing card. They are all addressed to MOM, the Os shaped into hearts.

  It’s as if Jason has left me an assignment. I gather the stack in my hand and leave the room.

  * * *

  —

  Holidays were important to me when I was young, because they were the only days almost everyone could agree upon. In school, there would always be a lead-up, the anticipation gathering into a frenzy as the day grew closer and closer. With Valentine’s Day, the world grew progressively red and pink as February began. It was a bright spot in a cold time, a holiday that didn’t ask much more of me than to eat candy and think about love.

  Because of this, I liked it a lot.

  * * *

  —

  Jason’s room is clearly his home base—the rest of the apartment holds fewer representatives from outside our universe. It isn’t a large place—just the two bedrooms wedged together with a kitchen and a den. Big enough for two people, but I feel it’s meant for at least one more.

  I try to stay quiet—over the years, I’ve learned to wake a parent only if it’s really, really important. Back before I realized I was waking into a different life each morning, I stormed carelessly into my various parents’ bedrooms, no matter what time it was. Most told me to go back to bed. Some used it as an excuse to get up. And enough lashed out at me that I stopped doing it, terrified that I’d landed in the wrong kind of life, and that my excitement at being awake would be used against me.

  On tiptoe steps, I enter the kitchen and find a valentine wonderland awaiting me. The room is aswarm with hearts—dropping from the ceiling, constellated across the cabinets, blooming from the countertop. There have to be hundreds of them, and to my eight-year-old eye, it looks like thousands. They peek out from drawers, scale the refrigerator, conga across the floor. In the silence of my sleeping, my mother has constructed this for me. There are hearts popping out of the toaster. Hearts running away with the spoons. Hearts swimming above napkins and hopscotching the paper towels.

  I can’t help but pick one up, feel the red pa
per between my fingers. Already, the heart in my hand is forming a personality in my head. This heart—a little squat, a little heavier on the left side—is a bit slower than the rest, but he tells good jokes. I name him Bruno. (I don’t know where the name comes from; it’s probably the dog or cat from a house I once lived in, the name all that remains in my memory.) Immediately, Bruno makes two friends, Sally and Lucy. They talk a valentine language, but luckily I can translate it into English.

  This is how my mother finds me nearly an hour later: at the kitchen table, building a jungle gym for my new friends. Celery for a slide. Broccoli to climb. Carrot sticks at fort-making angles. Bruno still has center stage, but the cast of characters has grown to at least a dozen. I believe I know them well.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day!” my mother says.

  Years later, I will remember her voice. I will remember the way she said it. With chime-like clarity, announcing that this is indeed a special day, and that even though I have done nothing to deserve it but be myself, it all belongs to me.

  In my haste to get lost in the heart-world I’ve conjured, I’ve forgotten to put out the envelopes Jason left. I’ve stashed them in a corner, by the gremlin-grumbling base of the refrigerator. Now I scoot down from my chair to retrieve them. I have not touched the larger pink envelope I found with my name on it on the kitchen table. I knew to wait until Mom woke up before opening it.

  My mother goes to the cupboard and reaches for something on a shelf I can’t imagine ever being able to reach. A few hearts fall as the door swings, but they make a soft landing. Two red-wrapped boxes emerge in her hands. I wonder how long they’ve been up there, and at the same time I could just as easily believe they’ve appeared at this very moment.

  It is just the two of us, giants in the world of hearts. It is just the two of us, together in a small kitchen on a Sunday morning. It is just the two of us, and now I am handing over my twelve envelopes and she is handing over the red-wrapped boxes, accompanied by the pink-clad card.

  It is a trick I’ve learned, to feel as if a card is for me even if it’s really addressed to the person I am that day. This is the only way I stop myself from falling through the fabric of everyday life. When I was a child, I could make myself believe that the words and the love behind them were always meant for me. Especially if I saw the expression of love in the eyes of the person who was giving the card to me.