THIS PASSION by Claire Seymour
For Liam, it’s always been Maddie. They were in physics together, freshman year of high school. She was awkward-looking then, still wishbone thin and uncomfortable any time she couldn’t keep her hands in her pockets. But there was something there, an instant chemistry between them. They would look at each other across the long lab tables, begin to laugh for no reason. His best friend Nathan had seen something early on, had said, “No way, man,” had said, “She’s going to fucking wreck you.” When Liam had kissed her for the first time – early spring, still cold, getting drunk on Nathan’s roof with shitty bodega alcohol – Liam’s first thought was I told you so. I knew it. It’s all Maddie. His plan has been simple, ever since he first kissed her. Make money, college, business school, stable job with money, Maddie. Be with Maddie, somehow. Stability, goodness, light. That’s always been the plan. That’s it.
* * *
Junior year, now. Early November, the sky bright and dipping low between tall buildings. He had asked Maddie to be his girlfriend last June, during grad party, in a light-blue rainstorm in Bushwick. They had been hooking up for two years at that point, in cold, echoing staircases at parties, against the fogged, indigo window of his shower, fumbling for each other in dark corners of movie theatres. It had been so long, it felt like his entire life, but anytime he had brought up making it official, she had changed the subject, or said, “I don’t know if I want that right now.” But then, that night in June, he had said, “I love you,” like that could solve everything. He couldn’t take it anymore. They had walked through the wide, dark streets lined by empty lots and sat next to each other on the sidewalk curb, the stars above them devoured by clouds.
“I’m scared,” she had said.
“About what?” he said. She didn’t answer. What else was there to say? He wanted to explain to her how lovely she was in this moment, in this fading blue; he wanted her to be his girlfriend. He said, “Please, Maddie, please.”
“Okay,” she said, finally, finally. “Yes.”
Now, even a year later, there are so many moments where he can’t believe he gets to be with her; that she is his. He’s waiting for her at exactly 3:15 at the bottom of the school steps, the weakening autumn light the color of whiskey. He’s holding a Ziploc bag of sliced mango from the cart on the corner, and Maddie emerges from the front door, a rush of children bounding down the stairs beside her, tugging on knitted hats in the shapes of fruit. She’s wearing a brown puffy coat and the gold hoops he bought her last month; she has become beautiful lately, men in the street staring at her, a random guy pulling him aside one night after he put her in a taxi to say nice job, man –when had that happened? When did so many people start trying to edge their way in, to her? He waves at her and she smiles. She skip-jumps down the stairs to him, burying her face in his shoulder.
“For you,” he says, holding up the bag of mango, and she lifts her face up to his, she’s iridescent, she’s smiling and preening, and he thinks there has never been anyone happier, luckier, than this.
* * *
To do 10/ 28/ 14
• Study for ACT at least three days a week – need at least a 32
• Ask teachers for recs
• Start thinking about Maddie’s birthday in January
• Ask to have dinner with Maddie’s family soon – hasn’t it been
too long since the last dinner?
• Make clinic appointment, restock on Adderall
* * *
The drug dealing is for Maddie too, although she doesn’t technically know about it. It started with Adderall – he has a prescription, bizarrely, when he doesn’t even have trouble focusing, he doesn’t – and now includes a little bit of weed, a little bit of coke, though he tries not to fuck with opioids. Usually, Liam regrets things before they even happen. It’s a gift he has, being able to understand where something is going to lead, and then ignoring it all while emotionally processing the repercussions. The drug dealing is something he regrets, already. He does it anyway.
Now Nathan is asking him for a friends and family discount, please. They’re on the 2 Train barreling towards the West Village after school, alone in their car and standing in the middle of the aisle, arms splayed at their sides like they’re surfing.
“You’re charging me twenty dollars?” Nathan says. His features are exaggerated as it is – thick black eyebrows that go straight above small green eyes – and when he’s acting incredulous, he looks ridiculous. “Me? Who you’ve known since the tender age of six?”
“Get over it,” Liam says, but he’s laughing.
They emerge from the subway tunnel to the roar of 14th Street, the crying of ambulances and the fizzing sound of taxis slowing, skidding at yellow lights. They cross the street, turn some corners until they’re in the more secretive part of the Village, cobblestoned streets and fresh lilies in the windows, glossy boutiques. Liam pulls a joint out of his pocket, lights it, takes a long inhale; he passes it to Nathan.
“Whatever you do,” Liam goes, “don’t start masturbating on Adderall.
You’ll never stop.”
“Jesus. Did your dick fall off?”
“I’m speaking hypothetically.”
“I’m shocked you even need to masturbate. Aren’t you and Maddie fucking, like, all the time?”
Liam plucks the joint from Nathan’s fingers, takes another hit so that he can answer with a vague, “Mmm.”
“Let me guess,” Nathan goes. “You’re using all of this drug money to take her to fancy restaurants.”
Liam ponders this for a second. Nathan’s dislike of Maddie is shapeless, morphing to fit whatever opportunity appears. Liam has stopped defending her, though he regrets this even in the moment.
“Well. Yeah, sometimes. But she doesn’t actually know.”
“About. . .?”
“That I deal, occasionally.”
He can feel Nathan slowing to look at him sideways, but he refuses to look back. He focuses on tugging at his backpack straps, at feeling
the chill in the air, the way the sky is solidifying with evening.
“I don’t get you, sometimes,” Nathan says, finally. “I just don’t get it. The fact that you would do anything for this girl. And she doesn’t even know you.”
* * *
She’s not like other people he knows – she just isn’t. Teachers love her; parents love her; she has so many close friends and they all confide in each other at coffee shops. She looks at adults in the eye and asks how they’re doing. She has a sweet laugh and types letters to her grandmother to make sure they’re perfect before neatly copying them in her spindly handwriting. When they’re together, she’ll rest her chin on his chest and tell him about her friends and her parents; what’s going on in their lives and how she might help. How did she ever learn to care for people like that? And he’ll be dozing off a little, because he doesn’t actually care that Serena’s parents might get a divorce, and as she scratches the inside of his arms, she’ll say, “Do you think I did the right thing, though?” And he’ll look at her serious face, her mouth small with worry, and he’ll say, “Of course, Maddie.” Because how could someone like her ever not do the right thing?
They go on long walks together along the West Side Highway, watching the boats rocking in the navy water and the skyscrapers stretching into the cottony clouds. They stop to catch snatches of the pick‑up soccer games and to guess which of the couples sunbathing on the benches are about to break up. She tells him about her dreams, to have her own psychology practice, to have a balcony with tomato plants, to have a built‑in bookshelf organized by spine color. And she asks him, too, and all he can see – other than money and a job – is her. This caring, dependable person who he loves, who was his first kiss at fourteen, his first everything – she is his whole history, practically. What could be more pure than that? And so as they walk with his hand in hers, as she kisses his wrist, his shoulder, he tells her about the things he would like to give her, in this dream of his: popsicles that taste like seasons, the salted air of Coney Island from that summer day last year, the feeling he gets around her, like someone has lit candles inside of his heart. You know. Those kinds of things.
* * *
His parents are poets. This is why he needs money. They are oddly wealthy, actually, some sort of inheritance, his dad flipping houses on the side, it’s unclear. Still, his dad’s job means sometimes there is money, lots of it, and sometimes – for long weeks during which his dad drinks too much and brings home undergrads who attended his readings – there is none.
“I can’t have a conservative for a son,” his mom is saying, pouring him a glass of wine. Liam lives with his dad but sees his mom about once a week, when she’s not flitting between friends’ houses across the country, looking for something to write about. They’re on her small balcony in Astoria. The sunset is injected with bright pink. The BQE spreads beneath them, cars shooting out of a tunnel like colorful bullets.
“Jesus,” Liam says. “I’m not a conservative. I just said I was a moderate.”
“Well, it’s the same thing to me, honey. I just don’t get it. I didn’t raise you like this.”
“It’s just – I need to, like, keep my money,” Liam says. He takes a long sip of his wine, sharp and cold. “I have a plan.” Money, college, business school, good job, Maddie, Maddie Maddie Maddie.
He met Maddie’s parents for the first time about a year ago, over giant bowls of pasta at her favorite Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. Maddie had been wearing a black collared dress, and he was sweating, repeatedly wiping his hands on his jeans. As they all talked, he was struck by the ease the three of them had, the way her mother paused to tuck a strand of Maddie’s hair behind her ear, the way Maddie leaned into her dad at one point and he squeezed her shoulder. And then, shockingly, how that ease, that warmth, encircled him too. Her mom asked him about his classes, his friends, what he wanted to do later on, making steady eye contact that at first made him stutter. And later, in the candlelight, when Liam was sated and sleepy, glancing at Maddie, at the shadows of flames flickering across her cheekbones, her dad said, “You know, Maddie is really special.” Maddie had said, “Oh god, Dad, stop.” But Liam had felt something building inside of him, a vision in his mind, the goodness and ease of the moment, of the restaurant and Maddie and her parents, solidifying like bricks and constructing this new doorway of light that was waiting for him, he could see it, he could. And he had said back, “I know. She is. Really, I know.”
Now, his mom says, “You and your plans,” waving her hand vaguely and looking at him over the top of her glass. “Well, you can’t vote yet. There’s still time.”
“I don’t like it when you say stuff like that,” Liam says. “Like, discount my opinion just because of my age. This is where I stand. It’s not going to just change. Okay?”
“Okay, honey,” she says, but her eyes are drifting elsewhere.
“Okay.” And Liam swallows the last of his wine, wanting more than anything to tell her sorry, okay, sorry. Sorry that I don’t think poetry is enough to nourish people; sorry that I don’t think it’s enough to keep them around.
* * *
Once a month, on the last Friday of every month, Liam allows himself to take a Xanax. This is what makes everything else – the plans, the pressure building up his spine – feel doable. He takes it at night, sipping at some of his dad’s whiskey, watching as the world begins to fold around him like origami. He slowly drinks more until everything is dark, peaceful. He wakes up, counts the weeks until he gets to do it again.
* * *
To do 11/ 8/ 14
• Seriously, get on it with the ACT
• Tell Nathan you shouldn’t smoke anymore
• Show up to school on time, stop snoozing alarm
• Dad taking money from desk again – find better hiding spot (bank??? Can u take drug money to bank??)
• Confront him (??)
• Finals coming up + college apps refill addy prescription again
• What is going on with Maddie?
* * *
The only window in his bedroom faces an alleyway, a brick wall, so most of his hours with Maddie, their days together, are spent in a state of perpetual darkness. It’s something he regrets already, that she is not associated with more colors, more weather. That she doesn’t directly overlap with his every memory of mountains, magenta, the first lilac-scented mornings of spring.
Now, they’re in his bed. “Open/ closed,” he’s explaining to her. “That’s how you’re . . . sexy, I guess.”
“What does that even mean?” she says. She’s turning onto her stomach to look at him, naked from the waist up. Her eyeliner is smudged, an olive green.
“It’s like . . . I don’t know. Sometimes you’re right there, you’re speaking about something intimate, you’re looking right at people, you get a real look into your mind. And the next minute – “
“The next minute?”
“You kind of – retreat. Like, into your own head. And it’s like you’re closed again.”
“And that’s sexy?”
“I . . . well – ” he falters. “There’s something . . . unreachable about it, I guess.”
“In a sexy way, you’re saying.”
“Well. It can be frustrating, too.”
Maddie breezes past that. The sun tilts on its axis at a just-right angle, the room filling with gold light, for a second. “So you want me to open up,” she says, eyebrows going up and down.
“God,” Liam says. He’s laughing. “Not like that.”
“No, no, I hear what you’re putting down. I hear it.” She’s tilting her face up to him, teasing, and he’s regretting, already, not saying more, not saying, why do you become closed off, though? Why can’t you just tell me everything you’re thinking, everything you’re feeling? Why not?
* * *
His dad steps into the doorway of his bedroom, hallway light outlining his silhouette. He says, “Wake up, Liam. I want to show you something.” It’s 3:00 in the morning. His mind is blurred with dream colors. Outside, a mist threads through the trees. The moon has been whittled down to a fingernail. They drive into the black whisper of Brooklyn, gliding through empty streets. His dad parks on Atlantic, and then lifts the caution tape surrounding an emptied Victorian-style townhouse.
“One of yours?” Liam says.
“One of mine,” his dad says. “Could go for millions, if the bones are right.”
They ascend to the third story and sit on the floor. The windows are tall and narrow like a cathedral, looking out onto the budding lights of Manhattan, the stars blinking like Morse code. They listen to the mice scratching between the walls, their flashlights sweeping across the ceiling in blue arcs and loops.
“See, this is what I mean about the bones,” his dad says, voice echoing through the room. He stands and begins to trace a finger along one of the walls. “Houses all look the same, before you start renovation. But then – “
“Then?”
“Then it all comes out, what’s going on underneath. Just like with people.” He turns, knocking hard on the wall: a sad, hollow sound, like a faint heartbeat. “See? Bad bones right there. It’s honestly that simple.”
* * *
200 dollars, 300 dollars, Liam’s making a fucking killing. He places bulk orders on the dark web, he cuts cocaine with baby powder, gums a little bit for himself so he can finish his bullshit history homework that has nothing to do with real life, and nothing to do with his plan. He brings little bags to parties, to school, he charges more and more, he tells his doctor that he needs a higher dosage of Adderall, he’s been struggling lately, suffering, even. If he keeps this up, he can take Maddie to that restaurant by the Highline for her birthday, that will prove something to her, won’t it? Won’t it? If he keeps this up, he can make it permanent, somehow, her sweetness, her goodness, he will be able to crack open her mind and understand everything, he will be able to have her for real, all of her, and the rest of his life her goodness, her background, her family, will seep into everything, she will unlock the gates of the world for him, he just knows it, he knows.
* * *
To do 11/ 20/ 14
• If dad doesn’t stop taking your money, you are going to go live with mom
• Or call the police
• If he counters with “oh yeah well where did you get all that cash??” tell him that there’s a lot you could get him in trouble for & there’s a lot of shit you could say
• Don’t make me bring it up
• Tell him to stop coming home so late bc then you can’t sleep and
• Calculus test on Tuesday and
• Why can’t Maddie just say something that will make you stop freaking out???
• Ask her to meet more of her friends you barely even know them
• Ask to hang out with Serena more?
• And ask Mom: what is your inspiration, anyway? What is poetry?
* * *
Sometimes, he gets into fights with Nathan. Physically, that is. It’s an unspoken thing. They’ll be playing video games at Liam’s place or getting high on the roof or snorting just a little bit of coke to study, okay, to study, and one of them – usually Nathan – will say something antagonistic.
Today, Nathan goes, “You’re so fucking whipped, dude, it’s pathetic.”
And Liam goes, “Are you serious right now?” and that’s really all it takes, they’re shoving at each other, punching each other – not anywhere that will leave a mark – and Liam feels something release inside of him, the tight rod of his spine, the valves that keep his heart tense and whole, everything loosens. Nathan hits him in the stomach, his breath pulled from his body and his vision dilutes beautifully, his knees hit the floor, a sharp, warm pain spreads inside of him.
“Okay,” Liam says, “okay,” and they stop, breathing heavily beside each other, continue to smoke.
* * *
To do 11/ 24/ 14
• Every time you go up to Maddie in school it’s like she doesn’t even know you does she get how that makes you feel
• Makes you want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge
• Am I really so bad??
• Nathan watching the whole thing like
• And Serena looking at you levelly, gray-blue lake eyes like are you good enough for her
• Always assessing me
• What does Maddie tell her anyway
• I’m not good enough. You want to say, to say it, to finally say it
• Like a surrender, like cop cars flooding you
• Sheets of red and blue light and your eyes blinking stop, stop, stop
• I’m not, you’ll yell, I’m NOT
* * *
He pictures her mind like different rooms. They’re painted different colors, in different places across the country. In one room, her mind is pale blue, overlooking a dried creek bed, and in another it is always dusk, and in another, it’s yellow, the curtains are hazes of dreamy white fabric, the air always smells like her. He pictures himself walking through the hallways. He is knocking on the doors.
* * *
A memory. Liam telling Maddie, “I miss you,” over the summer, when they were walking through Central Park, the sky glacier-blue and sunshine spider-webbed across the pavement, when she was going quiet, looking at things in that serious, focused way of hers, and he wanted to say, stay with me, don’t go into your own head, please, or at least take me with you. “Miss me?” she said. “I’m right here,” and he said, “Yeah, I meant, I meant, I guess I meant – “
* * *
A memory. He was eight. His mom was dating Rick, with his sleeves of tattoos and blonde ponytail down to his waist. He covered her apartment walls with graffiti, rich purples and turquoises and spray paint was choking the air and his mom was wearing sunglasses and drinking ginger tea, and Rick wanted to show him how to do it, could he just hold the paint bottle like this and Liam was shaking his head, his breath rapid, what was so wrong about just keeping the walls blank, keeping everything in perfect order, was that so –
* * *
He was thirteen and hotboxing in his bathroom with Nathan and they were getting so high they could barely speak. Nathan’s parents were out of town, as usual, leaving him home alone for two weeks with two bags of groceries and a Post-it Note saying goodbye. Nathan was pacing around the small bathroom, face flushed, he was saying, “We don’t need anybody,” was saying, “Right? We don’t. It’s you and me. Right?” And Liam’s chest was starting to feel tight, he felt like he could barely breathe, all he could think of was what am I doing here? What am I doing? How did this happen to us? And he tried to ask Nathan, he did, and Nathan laughed and said, “You are so deep, Dr. Liam, wow, really amazing stuff,” and Liam said, or maybe he just thought, no, not like that, I’m serious, I’m serious, I don’t understand –
* * *
He was fifteen and his dad was saying “Liam your grandparents left you some money and I am going to take some of it okay?” Was saying, “Just for this next house, you need to spend money to make money,” was saying, “Just sign here,” was saying, “Sometimes you are so selfish, just like your mother – “
And now – and now. He’s with Maddie, splitting a bottle of wine in his bed. She’s doing that thing again, where they’re talking, they’re laughing, and then she goes quiet, she’s studying her hands, little frown lines between her eyebrows, she’s slipping away. Liam says, “Maddie, what are you thinking?” She says, “Nothing, nothing,” and he says, “Maddie,” and she says, “Stop, nothing, I’m just thinking.” And Liam wants her so badly, more than anything; he lunges towards her to kiss her. She starts laughing, pushing his face away, says, “Oh my god, sorry, your face, you just looked so serious there for a second,” and anger surges through him. He pushes her down onto her back. She hums a little, appreciatively. He unbuttons her jeans, slides them down her legs, slaps her thighs, he wants to mark her, in some way, show that she is his, she is, for as long as possible. He sucks on her fingers, bites down, hard enough to draw blood, and she bucks a little, crying out. He straddles her, locking her legs together, touching her with one hand, the other hand around her throat, pressing, pressing. She shakes her head and squirms beneath him. He lets go, pulls her shirt roughly over her head, he grasps at her breasts, pinching her nipples with most of his strength, most of it, and she halfway sits up, gasping, saying, “Stop,” her voice coming out strangled, and for a second he doesn’t, for a second, and then she says, “Stop, stop,” and he does, he does stop, he stops right –
* * *
So, okay, technically speaking, sometimes he takes Xanax more than once a month.
When he’s lying in bed and his mind is going into dark circles, through tunnels that never end, and he needs it to be over, he needs it to just stop. He’s trying to do math and everything is reminding him of Maddie, why can’t he focus anymore, why can’t he concentrate? If she could just say something to reassure him, like he was always doing for her, then maybe he would feel better, but she won’t, of course she won’t. It’s not the last Friday of the month anymore, it’s not even fucking close. He crushes the white pill anyway. He lets it dissolve on his tongue. He braces himself. He regrets, already.
* * *
• Why doesn’t she talk to me in school
• Sometimes feel like she falls asleep after sex so that she doesn’t have to talk to me
• Why did she wait so long to introduce me to her parents
• Like she wasn’t so sure about me??
• Doesn’t always account for my feelings
• Mom saying she’s good for you. she’s such a good girl.
• Don’t want to regret this relationship sometime in the future if it’s not it
• Love her so much that’s why I care
• That’s all it is
• Wish there was another word for this kind of longing
• For this passion
• There are people who are passionate and people who are not and that’s just who I am, Maddie, what am I supposed to do with that
• I know I can get angry and lose control
• But people can’t change who they are and
• Do you understand what I mean when I say that?
It’s a bad night. Liam knows it. His mouth feels dry; his heart feels too close to the surface. It’s Friday, and they’re at a party at Evan’s on the Upper East Side. He lives in a townhouse overlooking Central Park, the rooms emptying into each other like a museum. Everyone is huddled together around the delicate, gray-blue furniture. Nathan eyes him, and then pulls him into the closest bathroom, immediately starts breaking up his stash of coke on the marble countertop with his credit card.
“I shouldn’t – ” Liam goes.
Nathan smirks at him, looking up. “I won’t tell your girlfriend.”
“It’s not that.” How can he explain? That he swears he can feel each of his bones; that it feels like they’re scraping together.
“Dude. You need this. I can tell.” Nathan leans down with the dollar bill, and sue him, okay, because seeing Nathan do it, it’s like his self-control, which he does have, vanishes, and he says, “Fuck it,” and he snorts some too. It’s too much, this stuff is strong – his hands begin to shake and it’s like something in his brain clicks on and he sees too much of everything, his skin is crawling with insects.
They find Henry on one of the sofas, and he passes them both a beer, leans into them to gossip. Henry is always watching everything. He goes, “Your girl’s been getting pretty chatty with Zach.” He nods to the corner of the room where Maddie is laughing at something Zach is saying, close to her ear.
“Chill,” Liam says, although his stomach has plummeted. Henry is watching him carefully for his reaction. He’s had this conversation with Maddie, Jesus Christ, of course she’s not just friends with Zach, of course not, she’s so full of shit, he commented “10/ 10” on her Facebook profile picture – a bikini shot no less, what the fuck, Maddie – and how does she not see it, anyway? The way that he looks at her? The way that he studies her mouth when she talks?
“I’m joking, mostly,” Henry says, laughing. Liam’s eyes have gone very dry, and he remembers that he needs to blink. He shuts his eyes tight, for a second. “That’s what you get when you’re dating someone who’s out of your league.”
“She is out of my league, I will fully admit that.” He’s seeing too much; he can’t stop staring. Zach seems to be leaning into her closer and closer. Maddie’s face is dimmed in the shadows. What is she thinking? He imagines himself lunging over to them, shoving Maddie back and then striking Zach in the face. He imagines how satisfying his own bloodied knuckles would feel. He takes a long, shaky breath, grips the edge of the sofa.
“Although,” Nathan says, leaning in closer to them. His breath is heady with alcohol. “This isn’t exactly unusual, for Maddie.”
“What does that mean?” Henry goes.
Nathan grins. His eyes have gone glittery. “You don’t know how they got together?”
Shut up, shut up, shut up Liam says, or maybe he just thinks it. His skin is still crawling with insects, he swears. He is scratching his arms, up and down.
“Grad party,” Henry says, turning to Liam. “You told me that. You guys left early and walked around Bushwick.”
Liam is cold, then hot. The music fades in and out. His heart is thrumming, it’s too close to the surface, it must be, he can feel its every twitch. He clears his throat. “Yes.”
“Well yeah,” Nathan goes. “But like, has he told you the before part?”
“No . . . ?”
“Nathan,” Liam says. His mouth tastes like metal. “Stop.”
“Basically,” Nathan says, voice too loud, slurring. “She was fucking some guy at grad party and Liam walked in – ”
“She didn’t fuck him.”
“Oh god sorry, gave him a blowjob in the bathroom, really classy, the guy was a Columbia student, don’t know what the fuck he was doing there – ”
“It was before,” Liam says, his voice is so dry, why is Maddie still talking to Zach, why, Henry is staring at him, his whole face is itching now, his chin and jawline, “it was before we got together.”
“I mean technically, but you had told her you loved her two weeks before and she said it back – ”
“Seriously stop.”
“Look,” Nathan says, and pressure is building up Liam’s spine, building and building. “You can’t see it because you’ve loved her since you were fourteen and you think she’s like – some sweet girl and so different from the rest of us, when she’s actually just like everyone else, and really fucking chaotic – ”
And his heart is still pulsing and his skin still crawling, and his brain is going into overdrive, suddenly, and he looks at Maddie across the room, where she’s still standing with Zach, and why is she laughing so hard, the coke is making everything race and whirl and the careful hold that he usually has on his thoughts and memories, it’s loosening, thanks to Nathan, he sees a flicker of grad party and no, not that one, and these memories are starting to push themselves into the light, it’s like a montage, it’s rolling, now, with sound and color –
• He’s with Maddie in Coney Island, they’re kissing between the waves, and she’s so afraid of jellyfish that he swims around her in circles saying that he’ll fight them all off and she laughs so hard that she gets water up her nose and on the Q train going back she looks so beautiful, cheeks seared from the sun, she falls asleep on his shoulder, hair salted from the ocean, there was nothing like this tenderness, he has never felt so –
• He’s at Maddie’s house, wearing that dumb blue hoodie, what was he thinking, acting so casual with her like that, her parents were out of town and they couldn’t fit on her twin bed so they made a fort out of blankets and pillows and she made them BLTs in her underwear and his white t‑shirt and they lay on the floor and she read him some of her favorite lines from The Great Gatsby, the stars were everywhere, through the window –
• They’re on the blocked-off section of the East Staircase, during that phase of hers where she wanted to have sex in school, so bizarre, Maddie, who barely acknowledged him in the hallways, like their relationship was just carved out for the most specific and convenient times of her life, so fucked up, but they’re on the staircase and she’s crying out as he touches her, her voice echoing across the cold walls and he’s saying shhh, and they’re running down the stairs together, after, and he’s saying, he’s trying, “I feel kind of used, to be honest,” and she says, “Wouldn’t most guys love to feel used?” And he says, but Maddie –
• No don’t think about that one
• No need to go there
• It wasn’t like that and
• May, and they’re in his bed, and okay, sometimes he writes poetry, only sometimes, just when he’s desperate, when he’s feeling things he needs to locate, when he needs to put his finger on the pulse of it all, and Maddie is resting her head on his heartbeat, tapping the rhythm on his arm, and he wants her to see him, to really see him, he says, “Can I read you something?” and she says “Yes,” and he sits up and reads it off his phone, so they are both illuminated only by the blue light, and afterwards, he looks up and she is looking at him so seriously and she kisses him on the lips and underneath his eyes and he says, “I love you,” and she says, “I love you too,” and he cries, and why is he crying? He falls in love with her again and again and again –
• But that can’t be right, it can’t be, that must have happened earlier or later, or maybe she hadn’t meant any of it, maybe she was just sneering to herself as he read, as he read that poem that felt like his whole self and whole heart, because
• It’s just two weeks later and it’s almost summer and it’s grad party and he is euphoric he has been waiting all day to see her to tell her that he’s not going to visit his mom in California this summer, he’s going to stay in New York, for her, with her, so he can see her every day and he’s opening the bathroom door, and
• She’s kneeling on the damp tiles and
• And –
Now everything’s fine, he’s left the party, he’s contained himself, he’s walked away from Nathan and Henry, and now is here, at home, with her. His thoughts have collated into something uniform and steady. See – how easy. He is with Maddie, and that is what matters. They’re debriefing, drinking tea. The memory of the night starts knocking on his mind and he wants to say, do you know how much that hurts me? When you flirt with Zach like that? Maddie takes small sips of her tea and tells him about a horrible drink someone made her, with grape juice and vodka, and she’s leaning back in bed, her shirt riding up her stomach, and the thoughts and memories and shadows are knocking louder and louder and he says, “And Zach? You were talking
to Zach, right?”
Maddie looks at him steadily.
“Right. Okay. Just wondering.”
“Don’t start.”
“What? Don’t start what?”
Maddie doesn’t answer, just takes another sip of her tea. He wants to grab her by the chin and make her look at him, and he says, “Do you get that I looked like an idiot? You flirting with him like that in front of my friends?”
She lets out a small laugh, surprised and sharp. “Yeah, okay,” she says, like Nathan with sarcasm, and all of those selves, all of that past hurt, it’s swimming right there in front of him, he can see it, it’s too much, she stands, begins to move toward the door, and then he grabs her wrist, so tight that he’s pressing into the bone, he’s yanking her towards him and she stumbles back and he wants to, he wants to –
She whips her head around and her eyes are on fire. Everything is very quiet and very still.
“Don’t,” she says slowly, “ever touch me like that again.”
“Maddie,” he says, his voice light and breezy, he can’t let her go, he can’t, the second he does, everything is going to fade, the room is going to sift between his fingers like sand, and who is he, really, without her, without her in his life and plan and, “I didn’t – ”
“Don’t,” she says again, and her voice is cold. He wants to grab her tighter, he wants to push her onto the bed, anything to stop that cold closed door, that veil in front of her eyes.
* * *
A Xanax. A shot of whiskey. The world erases itself.
* * *
To do 12/ 14/ 14
• I know you think this is my fault but to be honest with you
• I still love you despite –
• Everything
• I’m learning to write down
• What I really mean,
• What I really want to say is –
Claire Seymour’s stories have appeared in Narrative.