What to Say Next(12)

“Do you have eczema?” I ask. Clearly her sympathetic nervous system has caused her blood vessels to dilate. The best way for me to figure out the cause is by process of elimination. I am not good with social niceties, but I know enough not to ask outright if I’ve embarrassed her.

“That’s random. No. Why?”

“No reason.” Ha! Another lie. I’m getting good at this. “I like that expression. Eat your feelings. I keep a list of idioms. I’ll have to add that one.”

“You’re an idiom,” she says, and at first my stomach drops—she is making fun of me—but then I look up and see she’s wearing a friendly smile. This is good teasing, I think. This is banter, like in the old romantic comedies my mother likes to watch. I’ve never been much good at banter, which necessarily requires quick wit and an understanding of what to say next.

“Thank you very much for that,” I say. And then it’s my turn to blush. No need to go through a process of elimination. I know what caused it.

—

I watch a lot of movies, mostly as sociological research but also because I have a lot of time to fill, and what I’ve gleaned from them is that teenagers are supposed to actively dislike their parents. We should ask to be dropped a block away from school and on Saturday nights complain about our curfews. We should steal from our parents’ liquor cabinets, get drunk in parking lots with our friends, and make stupid decisions that lead to avoidable car accidents. We should get particularly annoyed when our mother or father asks us questions about anything involving the future or planning.

One benefit to being different is that none of the above appeal to me. My parents did a terrible job of naming me, and my mom takes, on average, an extra thirteen minutes more than necessary to buy toothpaste. My father tends to give long lectures on topics I only have a marginal interest in, like traffic patterns and ornithology, and Miney left me behind to go to college, but I like my family. I actually look forward to our after-school discussions.

“How was your day?” my mom says today, as she does every day when I get home from school. She puts a lasagna in the oven. Today is Tuesday, which is a pasta day. Lasagna is broadening the category a bit, but my dad and I try to be flexible. Tuesday also means that I have a guitar lesson, which I love even more than I hate my teacher, Trey, which is to say a lot, and that later I will do sixty-three minutes of martial arts training.

“Kit sat at my lunch table again.”

“No shit,” my mom says. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” I say, and let her no shit pass without comment, even though she knows it’s an expression I do not like. It makes me think of constipation, which makes me think about grunting, my least favorite noise, after squawking and chewing. I also have a list of favorite noises. It has one item on it: Kit’s laugh.

“Did you talk? Did you take off your headphones?”

“Of course.” My conversation with Kit is another Notable Encounter, a positive Notable Encounter, so pleasant that I don’t want to put it in my notebook. I want to pretend, for just a moment, that this is not a rare occurrence, that this sort of thing happens to me all the time. That I’m not the sort of person who even requires a notebook in the first place. “I know she thinks I’m weird, but it’s like she appreciates my weirdness. Like you guys, and Miney sometimes. Does that make sense?”

I ask this question a lot—Does that make sense?—usually to my family, because I appreciate clarity and assume others do as well. Much like ordering steak and naming children, language seems inherently and irrationally optimistic; we just assume other people understand what we are talking about. That we are, as the idiom goes, on the same wavelength. In my experience, we are not.

“Total sense. I can see you being friends with Kit, actually. She’s always been a nice kid. She used to come to all your birthday parties when you were little. Did you know that?”

“No, though I’m not sure which birthday parties you attend when you’re little is a fair reflection of your future character.” My mother doesn’t sigh—she’s good at suppressing the impulse—but if Miney were here that’s exactly what she’d do. I’ve gotten better at hearing myself lately, I think. If she did sigh, I’d have deserved it. “I mean, you’re right. She’s nice.”

“And freakishly smart, like you,” my mom says.

“Not sure the word freakish applies in any way to Kit. She’s exceedingly normal.”

“And pretty,” my mom says.

Pretty doesn’t fit Kit.

It’s too small a word. Like her name.

“Not pretty,” I correct her. “Beautiful.”

—

Trey’s on time, like usual, since he knows I don’t like when people are late. He’s wearing what he always wears: a conch shell on a leather string around his neck that he got in “Bali, man,” a ratty T-shirt with either a slogan (JUST DO IT!) or a platitude (YOLO!), and flip-flops, even though it’s winter. He’s a student at Princeton, but he looks nothing like the guys on the cover of the university brochure he once brought over for me. He does not wear khakis or belts or a blazer, and he’s not white. I once asked him what he was, and, after he explained that was a rude question, he said a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian (Southeast Asian, not Native American), and half African American. Kit’s half Indian, but she looks nothing like Trey, which is just another example of why genetics is such a fascinating field.