Turtles All the Way Down(58)

“Hi,” I said.

“I missed you,” he said.

After the nervous-making car trip, my brain was revving up. I told myself that having a thought was not dangerous, that thoughts aren’t actions, that thoughts are just thoughts.

Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you’re standing on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn’t have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it.

And then I got in the car.

I sat down in the booth and instead of sitting across from me, he sat next to me, his hip against mine. “I talked to your mom a few times,” he said. “I think she’s coming around to me.”

Who cares if he wants his bacteria in my mouth? Kissing is nice. Kissing feels good. I want to kiss him. But you don’t want to get campylobacter. I won’t. You’ll be sick for weeks. Might have to take antibiotics. Stop. Then you’ll get C. diff. Or you’ll get Epstein-Barr from the campylobacter. Stop. That could paralyze you, all because you kissed him when you didn’t even actually want to because it’s fucking gross, inserting your tongue into someone else’s mouth. “Are you there?” he asked.

“What, yeah,” I said.

“I asked how you’re feeling.”

“Good,” I said. “Honestly not good right now, but good in general.”

“Why not good right now?”

“Can you sit across from me?”

“Um, yeah, of course.” He got up and moved around to the opposite bench, which made me feel better. For a moment, anyway.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Can’t do what?”

“This,” I said. “I can’t, Davis. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. Like, I know you’re waiting for me to get better, and I really appreciate all your texts and everything. It’s . . . it’s incredibly sweet, but, like, this is probably what better looks like for me.”

“I like this you.”

“No, you don’t. You want to make out and sit on the same side of the table and do other normal couple things. Because of course you do.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “Maybe you just don’t find me attractive?”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“But maybe it is.”

“It’s not. It’s not that I don’t want to kiss you or that I don’t like kissing or whatever. I . . . my brain says that kissing is one of a bunch of things that will, like, kill me. Like, actually kill me. But it’s not even about dying, really—like, if I knew I was dying, and I kissed you good-bye, literally my last thought wouldn’t be about the fact that I was dying; it would be about the eighty million microbes that we’d just exchanged. I know that when you just touched me, it didn’t give me a disease, or it probably didn’t. God, I can’t even say that it definitely didn’t because I’m so fucking scared of it. I can’t even call it anything but it, you know? I just can’t.”

I could tell I was hurting him. I could see it in the way he kept blinking. I could see that he didn’t understand it, that he couldn’t. I didn’t blame him. It made no sense. I was a story riddled with plot holes.

“That sounds really scary,” he said. I just nodded. “Do you feel like you’re getting better?” Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

“Maybe,” I said. “Honestly, I feel really fragile. I feel like I’ve been taped back together.”

“I know that feeling.”

“How are you?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“How’s Noah?” I asked.

“Not good.”

“Um, unpack that for me,” I said.

“He just misses Dad. It’s like Noah’s two people, almost: There’s the miniature dudebro who drinks bad vodka and is the king of his little gang of eighth-grade pseudo-badasses. And then the kid who crawls into bed with me some nights and cries. It’s almost like Noah thinks if he screws up enough, Dad will be forced to come out of hiding.”

“He’s heartbroken,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Aren’t we all. It’s . . . I don’t really want to talk about my life, if that’s okay.” It occurred to me that Davis probably liked what infuriated Daisy—that I didn’t ask too many questions. Everyone else was so relentlessly curious about the life of the billionaire boy, but I’d always been too stuck inside myself to interrogate him.

Slowly, the conversation sputtered. We started talking to each other like people who used to be close—catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together. By the time he paid the bill, I knew that whatever we’d been, we weren’t anymore.

Still, once I was home and under the covers, I texted him. You around?

You can’t do it the other way, he replied. And I can’t do it this way.

Me: Why?

Him: It makes me feel like you only like me at a distance. I need to be liked close up.

I kept typing and deleting, typing and deleting. I never ended up replying.

—

The next day at school, I was walking across the cafeteria to our lunch table when I was intercepted by Daisy. “Holmesy, we have to talk privately.” She sat me down at a mostly empty lunch table, a few seats away from some freshmen.