The Nix(52)
“Yes,” Samuel lied. “They’re happy.”
“They are happy.”
And Samuel felt himself believing he really could hear this. The same kind of voluntary self-hallucination he felt when he convinced himself, at night, in bed, that there were intruders in the house, or ghosts, and every sound the house made validated this delusion. Or on those days he couldn’t bear to go to school and told himself he was sick until he really became sick, felt actually physically ill, and he would wonder how the nausea could be real if he created it in his mind. It was like that, this thing he was hearing. The sound of static really did get warmer the more he thought about it; it really did become a happy static. The sound seemed to broaden in his mind, open up, and burn.
Was this her secret, he wondered. That she simply wanted to hear what no one else could?
“I can hear it now,” he said. “You just have to chase it.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”
He felt her hand grasp his shoulder and squeeze, then felt her move closer to him, felt the vibrations and swells in the mattress, the slight creaks of the bed frame as she swiveled around and came into him. She was close. He could hear her breathing, smell her toothpastey breath. But more than that he could feel her nearby, how she seemed to displace the air, had some kind of electricity around her, how you can sense the closeness of another body, the presence of some kind of magnetism, her heartbeat throttled up, all this coming at him as an impression in space, a map his mind made, an intuition, and then finally as actual solid matter, the flesh of her face now close enough to comprehend.
They were, he realized, going to kiss.
Or, rather, she was going to kiss him. This was going to happen. All he had to do was not screw it up. But in that moment, in those few seconds between realizing she was going to kiss him and the actual kiss, there seemed to be so many ways to screw it up. He felt the pressing and unexpected need to clear his throat. And scratch the back of his neck, at that spot where his neck joined to the shoulder, which always itched when he was nervous. And he did not want to move into the kiss, as it was dark and he could accidentally knock teeth with Bethany. But then in his desire to avoid knocking teeth he felt himself maybe leaning back and overcompensating and he worried that Bethany might mistake his leaning away from her as a desire not to kiss and she might stop. And then there was the matter of breathing. As in: Do it? His first impulse was to hold his breath, but then he realized if she approached slowly enough or if they kissed long enough, he would eventually run out of air and be forced to breathe mid-kiss and expel his lungs in a big poof right into her face or mouth. All of these thoughts happening roughly simultaneously in that brief moment before the kiss, Samuel’s most rudimentary actions, his body’s most automatic functions—sitting straight, being still, breathing—now turned crazily difficult by the prospect of the kiss, which is why when the kiss actually did successfully commence, it felt like a miracle.
Mostly what Samuel felt during the kiss was relief that the kiss was happening. And also that Bethany’s lips felt dry and chapped. This odd detail. That Bethany had chapped lips. It surprised him. In his imagination of her, Bethany seemed elevated beyond stupid earthly concerns. She did not seem to be the kind of girl whose lips ever chapped.
On the way home that night, he was surprised that everything looked exactly the same as it did before, with absolutely no signs that the world had fundamentally, radically changed.
10
THE FIRST BOOK Samuel ever wrote was a Choose Your Own Adventure story called The Castle of No Return. It was twelve pages long. He illustrated it himself. Its premise: You are a brave knight fighting your way through a haunted castle to save a beautiful princess. Pretty standard fare, he knew. He was sure he’d read something similar in one of the many Choose Your Own Adventure books that filled his bedroom shelves. He really had tried to come up with a better, more original story. He sat cross-legged on his floor and stared at the books before him and eventually decided they represented the full range of human possibility, the entire narrative spectrum. There were no other stories that could be told. Every idea that came to him was either imitative or stupid. And his book could not be stupid. The stakes were too high. Every kid was writing a book in an all-class contest where the winning author would have the book read aloud by the teacher.
So The Castle of No Return was derivative. So be it. He hoped his classmates would not be tired of the old tropes just yet. He hoped they would be comforted by the familiarity of the tale like they were comforted by the old toys and blankets they sometimes hid in their backpacks.
The next problem was plot. He knew Choose Your Own Adventure books forked this way or that, then forked again, and then again, and that each story was in the end a unified narrative whole—many stories in one. But his first draft of The Castle of No Return resembled more of a straight line with six short dead ends, with choices that would cause little debate or consternation: Do you want to go left or do you want to go right? (If you go left you die!) He hoped his classmates would forgive these shortcomings—the plagiarized setting, the lack of multiple cohesive plots—if he could find really interesting and creative and entertaining ways to die. Which he did. Samuel had a talent, it turned out, for killing his characters interestingly. In one possible ending involving a trapdoor and a bottomless pit, Samuel wrote: “You are falling, and you fall forever, and even after you close this book and eat dinner and go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow, you will still be falling”—which just totally blew his mind. And he used the ghost stories his mother told him, all those old Norwegian stories that terrified him. He wrote about a white horse that appeared suddenly, offering a ride, and if the reader decided to mount the horse, terrible death quickly followed. In another ending, the reader becomes a ghost trapped inside of a leaf, too bad to go to heaven, too good to go to hell.