Biggie (4 page)

Chapter 5

Annarocks

Annabelle drops two Kit Kats and a Lo-Carb Monster Energy drink on the counter with a small smile and hands me a ten-dollar bill. We don't talk about last Friday or yesterday's perfect game. As I scan the junk food, I want to tell her that I'm going to do everything I can to make her dream of seeing me pitch come true. When I take a quick look at her, I go blank. Instead I say, “I don't care.”

“What?”

“The Kit Kats,” I mutter. “You can just have them.”

“Just give me my change, Biggie.”

She walks out and I'm back to doing one of my favorite things: staring out the window at Highway 3. I watch guys drive by with a girl in the passenger seat. One night, I saw twenty-seven straight cars with a guy and girl in the front. Like most workdays, I begin to dream about the day when I take Annabelle on the perfect date, and she sits next to me in my black 2006 Chevy Silverado, which I bought from my uncle when he got a new work truck. I know she loves Chevy trucks. We will drive down to Cedar Falls and eat at McKellen's Steak House. I know she loves their chicken salad and popovers. Finally, we'll drive down the hidden highways and gravel roads of northeastern Iowa, drinking Honey Weiss beer and listening to Def Leppard, a band she saw with her cousin three years ago at the state fair. It was her first concert.

How do I know what Annabelle wants to do on a date? Well, it isn't from social media or overheard conversations after school. What the rest of the school knows about Annabelle is superficial garbage: tweets about getting coffee or being exhausted after a big test. She tweets about current bands and current movies as her favorites, but it's all lies, small concessions she makes in order to fit in the clique of kids who care about Finch High School. She wants to make sure that when friends see her feed, they notice she loves the same stupid things they enjoy. It's all lies.

If people found out what I know about Annabelle they would know that she loves everything old: bands like Def Leppard and Poison, TV shows like
Friends
,
Married with Children
, and
Golden Girls
—which was actually really funny when I gave it a chance.

When teachers ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she always says real estate agent like her mother and two aunts. Rivers Realty sells most of the homes in Finch. While her mom counts down the days until her only daughter becomes another member of the Rivers Realty family, Annabelle dreams of being a writer. She loves poetry and shares her work with her cousin, who returns friendly compliments, even on the pieces that I feel aren't very good.

Annabelle lives two lives. She tells her Finch friends lies but she tells her cousin, her best friend since age three, her true thoughts, passions, and fears in rants sent with an email account that she started back in seventh grade.

For the past five years, I have known her screen name and password. Her screen name is abrivers, easy to read if you walk by her desk at the perfect time. Figuring out the password took listening skills, patience, a keen eye, and an obsession that wouldn't go away.

I was twelve years old and I had no idea that I loved Annabelle. I knew that her developing chest made me stare uncontrollably. Every day I would watch her whirl strands of her curly hair with a cheap plastic blue pen. If I looked close enough, I could see smudges of lip gloss smeared on the top half of the pen. When she walked by me in the hallway, I tried hard to look her in the eyes, but my gaze always fell to her boobs. I had to blink and turn away before I got busted as the pervert I feared I was becoming. I looked at other girls, but gawked and dreamed of only one: Annabelle Rivers.

At the start of the seventh-grade second semester, everyone got a new schedule. Annabelle and I had life science together. I could see on the top of her desk a grocery-bag-wrapped science book. On the cover, surrounded by pink hearts, green stars, and blue dots, were nine letters: annarocks.

In my room that night, I started scribbling
annarocks
on a notebook page, and I couldn't stop. I just wrote it over and over again:
annarocks
,
annarocks
,
annarocks
,
annarocks
—in different fonts and sizes. I would write one with a big
A
and then one with all small letters. The page must have had a hundred different versions. Finally, with the tiny bit of remaining white space, I scribbled,
Anna rocks me hard all night long
.

I didn't know what it meant, but it caused my heart to skip a beat and made me drop the pad of paper on the floor. As I rolled over on my bed to pick it up, I saw my reflection in my computer monitor. I just stared at it for one minute, then two, then five, until finally a big smile reflected on the black, dusty fourteen-inch screen.

I got up, ignored the pad of paper at my feet, and sat down at my desk. I pushed the on button and the computer started to breathe, welcoming me with its familiar chime. I went to the Gmail homepage, typing in the letters: abrivers in the ID box. With my pinkie, I tabbed my cursor to the password box. Slowly, with rising excitement creating goose bumps on my arms and pulsing static energy on my cheeks, I pressed the keys methodically with the precision of a brain surgeon: a-n-n-a-r-o-c-k-s.

After one long, deep, lung-filling, relaxing breath, I hit Enter.

Chapter 6

Comfortable Conversations

I have friends. Tons, actually. Over the past four years, I have accumulated a massive number of online friends. I'm not lonely, far from it. Tonight, I'm looking at pictures from my online friend Lucy's seventeenth birthday party.

Lucy lives to have fun. She loves guys and girls who party. She smokes Marlboro Lights and weed, drinks, and stays out late, even on school nights. The only reason she gets online at all is because she's so frenzied after a night of partying that she can't calm down.

In real life, a girl like her and me would never coexist. I would be way too boring with my hatred of face-to-face conversations. She parties. I hate parties. Or at least I assume I'll hate them. Yet we're good friends and I think she likes me. In fact, she likes me so much that she sent me birthday party pictures, one with her eyes closed and lips puckered to offer me a birthday kiss. Technically, she should do that when it's
my
birthday, but I still think it's cute. I love—let me repeat—I love the online world.

It's perfect. I write something out, and before I send the message, I look at every word, syllable, and letter. If I find something I don't like, I can move the cursor, erase, and replace. Online, I can have comfortable conversations without all the sweat, worry, or jitters of face-to-face confrontations.

Too bad the real world doesn't work that way. If it did, I could walk down the hallways at school, see Annabelle, and say, “You look nice in that shirt,” which I often think because of her love for cool, colorful, and tight attire. If the world were a chat room, the compliment would hover in the air and allow me time to tinker, correct, and improve my sentence. I could replace
nice
with a powerful word like
great
. I could erase
in that shirt
, which brings to her attention what my eyes are focused on and replace it with something simple, friendly, and to the point, like
today
. If I could turn Finch High School into a chat room, I would talk to Annabelle every day and say things like, “You look great today.”

Even with the possibility of pondering words, I still need the necessary information to make a girl fall for me. I don't lie about being overweight. If a girl asks for a picture, I send one, so I can't get by on my looks like Killer or Kyle. I have to be the nice guy, the thoughtful one, and the good listener.

I realize that my mind can't hold statistics on more than a hundred girls, so I have a black three-ring binder that I fill with notes to keep track. It's my personal black book, like all the suave men have in old black-and-white movies. When someone tells me that her dad is being an asshole, I look up notes in her section and find a page titled
Previous father rants
. All girls have daddy issues. I'll reply, “Reminds me of when he took your car without asking a couple weeks ago.” She loves that. The more information I know about a person, the better. If I wanted to, I bet I could write autobiographies for fifty people that I've met online.

While I have notes on more than one hundred girls, I can probably toss out most of the notes as girls come and go. They get bored with online dating or get a boyfriend. In some cases, I have to ignore them because of what I like to call “a desire to get too close to me.” Online dating is about distance and not making real eye contact. If I wanted to talk and see a girl close up, I would just talk to the girls at my school. When a girl starts talking about meeting or moving here, I ignore them. Their notes stay in the binder though. Why? I guess I just like knowing some girls would stalk me if I gave them the opportunity.

Of the one hundred girls, only a handful really interest me. There's Jamie, a girl from Indiana. She loves movies and wants to be a critic. She probably sees two hundred films a year. I live in a small town with no movie theater, so I don't get to see many new releases, but I don't tell her that. For all she knows, I see two or three movies a week. To keep up this ruse, I have three movie review sites up when we chat. She mentions a movie and I quickly pull up information on the film so we can discuss it. I'm prepared.

Then there's Maddy from Colorado. She loves to take pictures. She sends me tons of photos of mountains, animals, friends, or herself in a new outfit (or sometimes in nothing at all) and waits for my opinion. Sometimes she sends them to my email and sometimes to my phone. No matter where she sends the pictures, I have at least ten minutes to construct the perfect answer. I can't just say, “That's a cool picture.” She can see right through that. I need to give interesting, deep answers—I'm the thoughtful one.

Last week, she sent me a picture of her dog standing in front of a red hatchback car. After an hour, I realized that the dog's black eyes matched the color of the worn-out tires on the hatchback. I wrote back that I loved how the smoky color of the dog's eyes matched the rips and tears of the beat-up tires. She texted back a smiley face and later sent me a picture of her boobs as a reward for understanding the importance of backgrounds in photos.

I wish all the girls I talk to loved their bodies as much as Maddy loves hers.

Other than
Don't show up at my doorstep someday
, the only real rule I have for my online girls is—don't call me, ever! This may seem like a dumb rule and maybe it is, but if I let a girl call me, I'm no longer having a comfortable conversation. I need the moments between what she types and texts to prepare my perfect answer. Talking to them on the phone is no different than me talking to Annabelle at school: a situation destined for laughter, weird looks, and ridicule. Plus no one calls anyone. Everyone texts. Slowly but surely, my dream is coming true. The world is turning into a chat room.

Only one online girl calls me: the already discussed, newly seventeen-year-old Lucy from Kansas City, Missouri. She's the only girl to break the rule, to defy me, to do what I told her not to do. See, I give out my number to girls with the stipulation that they only text and send me hot and sexy pictures. No phone calls. And with the exception of Lucy from Kansas City, they obey.

One night about four months ago, my phone rang at three in the morning. Caller ID said
Restricted
. Mostly out of it, I answered and mumbled, “Hello.”

“Henry,” a female's voice said.

“Who is this?”

“Lucy.”

“Oh, okay.”

“My car died and I'm stuck on the side of the road waiting for AAA,” she said. “Will you talk to me while I wait?”

“Okay” seems to be the only word I can mutter with my eyes closed and my face shoved into a pillow.

We
really didn't talk. She went on and on about how horrible her 1982 Ford Escort was acting. Then, she ranted about how this guy who invited her to this college party tried to get her drunk and when she lied to him and said she doesn't drink, he ignored her and talked to another girl. Partway through the story, I fell asleep.

The next morning she called me and said, “Hey, what's up with you passing out on me?”

I wanted to rant and rave about the no-calling rule, but I felt bad about dozing off with her stranded on the side of the road, so I let it slide and opened Pandora's box.

Now she calls a couple times a week, mostly in the middle of the night. It's not that big of a deal because she only expects consciousness from me. She talks and talks and talks and talks. When she calls now, I just balance the phone between cheek and shoulder bones and let her roll. I guess someone could say she's the closest thing I have to a real girlfriend.

“Biggie, let me in!” Maddux pounds on the door.

I quickly send an email telling Lucy how much I love the birthday pictures before unlocking the door.

“What are you doing in here, whacking off to porn?”

“Shut up. You don't even know what
whacking off
or
porn
is,” I say.

“Yeah, I do,” he says. “The hotels have porn on Channel 1.”

“Fine,” I say. “So why are you here? Do you wanna play some Minecraft or something?”

“We need to practice the knuckleball some more,” Maddux says.

“We've been practicing for two weeks. I need a break,” I say. “Not tonight. It's Friday, and I'm talking with my friends.”

“Who?” He sticks his head between me and the computer monitor. His hair smells like day-old milk from constant batting practice and zero showers. “Invite them over to be pretend hitters.”

“You need to shower,” I tell him.

“I will tomorrow.” He pulls his head back. “Can your friends come over?”

“My friends don't live here,” I say. “They live in other states.”

He reaches for the mouse. “Just click off then. They aren't real friends if you can't hang out.”

I pull his arm away. “Maddux, get out of here. I'm not in the mood to pitch.”

“You know, maybe if you join the team you'll get real friends,” he says.

“Screw you. What do you know? I've never seen you with anyone,” I say and regret it immediately. This is another reason I hate face-to-face talking—I always end up with my foot in my mouth.

“I don't care. I'll make friends this summer when I play ball,” he says. “Then I'll have lots of friends, real friends in Finch, and you'll still be all alone here. If you don't want me to help you, fine. Have fun talking to the screen.”

I grab the back of his T-shirt to keep him in the room. “Calm down. I'll get my glove,” I say.

“Awesome,” he replies and I start to think he just got one over on me. “We need to practice because there's a baseball meeting and open gym tomorrow night at school.”

“What meeting?” I ask. “The season doesn't start for nine months.”

“Do you not know where you live?” Maddux knows very well I do, but that question isn't expecting an answer. “It's Finch. Baseball's a year-round sport.”