Friend Is Not a Verb (6 page)

The next day got off to a crappier-than-usual start.

I was exhausted, for one thing. I’d stayed at Emma’s until one o’clock in the morning—much later than usual—watching a
Behind the Music
rerun marathon on the VH1 Classic network. (I’ll never understand why VH1 temporarily cancelled this show. Best. Cheesy. Melodrama. Ever.) Coincidentally, the theme was forgotten bands from the nineties: Blues Traveler, Barenaked Ladies, and Hootie and the Blowfish (how had
they
sold sixteen million albums?). It culminated with a ninety-minute special about the New Kids on the Block. I wondered if Gabriel had watched, too, seeing as one of the few things I knew for certain about him was that he was in a nineties
nostalgia band—whatever that even meant. Then I remembered he didn’t have a TV.

Emma and I gave up on the job hunt after it became clear that very few employers were looking to hire sixteen-year-olds with no skills whatsoever. After briefly asking myself whether I should be concerned that Mom and Dad hadn’t called to check up on me, I stumbled home and collapsed into bed without bothering to brush my teeth.

That’s when the trouble started.

Stupid, stupid dreams.

Four summers ago there had been a curious (and, yes, possibly supernatural) incident between Emma and me. We’d both had dreams about going to school naked, and we both made the mistake of telling each other about them. Or rather I made the mistake of telling
her
, and then she confessed that she’d had the exact same dream a week earlier. The details they shared—exposure of our private parts during assembly, the improvised use of arts-and-crafts smocks to hide our shame, a cameo appearance by both sets of parents—were so eerily similar that we made a pact never to talk about dreams again.

And what do you know? Last night, I dreamed I made out with her.

I admit: It wasn’t the first time I’d had a dream like this. But this was the most vivid. I even remembered what she was wearing: a flowery sundress, straight out of
The Great Gatsby
. We were at the Journey concert. (Not that
The Great Gatsby
has anything to do with Journey, but causal relationships aren’t
big in Dreamworld.) As usual, I awoke with a start just as it was getting intense. Then I tossed and turned for the rest of the night, wondering if Emma had ever had a make-out dream (or more) about
me
. Of course, the lesson I’d learned from the going-to-school-naked dream—and that I hoped Emma had, too—was that stupid, stupid dreams mean nothing. It was the lie I clung to, at any rate.

I will say this: Our pact to shut up about dreams kept me from obsessing about them more than I probably would have.

That’s what I reminded myself when I finally staggered out of bed that morning.
Focus on what’s real.
Real life was not Emma’s lips pressed against my own in the middle of a standing ovation for “Come Sail Away.” (Which isn’t even a Journey song; it’s Styx—More proof that dreams mean nothing.) Real life was Dad doing his taxes at the dining room table. It was Mom frying up another egg sandwich to go for me, Sarah tearing up weeds in the backyard, and Mom and Dad letting her do whatever she wanted even though none of them would offer up a single detail about last year. It was Gabriel’s stolen manuscript still hidden under my pillow. Above all, real life was being late for my 10:30 bass lesson and not being at all sure that I wanted to go anymore, anyway.

Gabriel answered the door in an oversize black Tupac, R.I.P. T-shirt and green boxer shorts. He didn’t bother to put on pants after I came in. Apparently our relationship had entered a new, much-too-intimate, pantless phase that he hadn’t thought to
clear with me first. He draped his bass around his neck and shoulders and plugged into his practice amp, then turned to me expectantly.

I stood by the door, my own bass still zipped up in the case on my back.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Am I supposed to play in my underwear, too?”

His pale cheeks reddened. “Whoops. I totally forgot to get dressed. I don’t get outside as much as I should.” He grabbed a pair of jeans from a rumpled laundry pile near his futon and shimmied into them without taking his bass off, nearly tripping and toppling headfirst into the amp.

That pretty much set the tone for the next several minutes. I clumsily plugged my bass into the other input. The speaker immediately began to buzz, an irritating fact both of us chose to ignore. Then, without explanation, he began to play the opening riff to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy.” It actually sounded pretty good. I mean, I hate the song, but he nailed the harmonics and even kept a little rhythm track going by plucking a muted string on every second and fourth beat. I had the feeling that he was showing off for me with the one song he’d learned to play well. I admit: I used to do the same thing with “Another One Bites the Dust” when I was in PETRA. After maybe six-dozen repetitions, he encouraged me to try to “sound out the melody.” The wrong notes I offered in response were so cringeworthy that they eventually prompted him to ask, “Do you know the song ‘Jeremy,’ by Pearl Jam?” I told him I didn’t.

On the glass-half-full side of the situation, he didn’t mention the stolen manuscript. I relaxed enough to convince myself that he still didn’t know it was missing. Finally he stopped playing. We stood like that for a while—facing each other in awkward silence, joined by the cords in his amp—until I decided to take a risk.

“So, what are those manuscripts piled up over there by the door?” I asked.

“They’re copies of a very long love letter to your sister,” Gabriel replied.

I stiffened, accidentally banging my tuning pegs against one of the bare walls. Needless to say, this was not the answer I’d wanted or expected.

He laughed. “Well, not entirely. I mean, I do want to tell my story. Once I know what it is. I’m sending it out to a bunch of publishing houses, actually. I saw on a literary blog that memoirs are really big now—especially memoirs written by criminals. And given how screwed up the world is, I’m thinking that people might actually want to read it, especially since it’s one of those tell-alls that’s actually true. Plus, it can’t hurt that I’m young. So I want to cash in. Once I do, I can pay my debt for my crimes.”

I nodded with a sickly smile frozen on my face. I realized now that I was wrong in thinking that my family was certifiable (well, not really). But Gabriel was in a different league. He frightened me. His tone was perfectly neutral, too, so I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Not that I even
understood half of what he was saying.

“You know, I never told Sarah how I felt about her,” he added. “Or she never told me about how she felt about
me
—and things got out of control because of it. Plus, I fooled myself into thinking I was in love with this other friend of ours, a girl named Madeline…. Well, it’s a long story. You’ll see. Someday.”

“Can I read the manuscript now?” I blurted out.

“No, Hen, I’m sorry. Not until it’s finished. That’s only the intro, anyway. Just a teaser that will hopefully get a book deal. Sarah can’t read it until it’s published either. None of us can, because I still don’t know how it’ll end. Look, I apologize if I’m being inappropriate here, but judging from the way you turned red and ran out yesterday…Are you really tight friends with some girl who you have a secret crush on?”

I blinked.
Jesus.
Where had that come from? My lips trembled. I felt an inexplicable urge to confess: that I’d already stolen one of the manuscripts and that my brain was short-circuiting not knowing
why
Sarah and her friends had run away, or why she and Gabriel had inexplicably come back. On the other hand, I didn’t want to admit I was a liar and a thief. And I sure as hell didn’t want to admit to the dream I’d had about Emma. I couldn’t get a grip on
what
I wanted from this guy. Could it be that in some deeply, profoundly, psychologically damaged way…I wanted to impress him? Now I
was
frightened. Honestly, who would want to impress this schmuck? Was it because he was so close with Sarah? Or because he seemed to know so much about me, even though he didn’t know me at all?

“I don’t mean to pry,” Gabriel said.

“No, it’s just—My best friend is this girl named Emma,” I stammered. “But there’s nothing between us. I swear. She isn’t the love of my life who’s been hiding in plain sight all along. See, the thing is, though, my girlfriend dumped me the other night. The night you and Sarah came home.”

“I
do
see,” Gabriel said. “What’s your ex’s name?”

“Petra Dostoyevsky. Why?”

“It’s just interesting that you referred to Emma by name and Petra Dostoyevsky by label. I’d say that Emma means more to you—and in all ways. It’s a sign. It’s not the first time you used that line, either, isn’t it?”

“What line?”

“The love of your life who’s been hiding in plain sight all along,” he said. “It sounds rehearsed.”

It was. There’s a story there. Franklin is a nice, boring, mostly well-adjusted high school, as far as it goes. But it
is
a high school, so there are a few sad troglodytes who believe that the key to popularity is to be an asshole. Since Emma and I pretty much keep to ourselves, people generally let us go about our silly lives. But every now and then someone—usually an athlete, sad but true (even their identities lack imagination)—will ask us what our “deal” is. Sometimes they’ll ask if we’re “friends with benefits.” To which Emma will reply yes: We both come with dental insurance and a $250 deductible.

Mostly, however, they’ll accuse us both of being gay. “Are you gay, or what?” (An actual quote, verbatim. Staggering, isn’t
it?) A long time ago, we came up with a standard response: Drop our jaws, stare at each other as if we’ve been struck by lightning, and spout a teen movie cliché. “Oh my God, Hen, you’re the love of my life, and you’ve been hiding in plain sight all along!” “Emma, you’re the girl next door, and I totally just realized you complete me.” “You
are
the cheese to my macaroni.” And so forth. It helps. Troglodytes don’t like to be confused.

“How about we play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?” Gabriel suggested.

Coming here was a terrible idea. I should have stayed at home and read the stolen manuscript. It was all getting a little too heavy, a little too fast. Yesterday, the proverbial arm was numb; now it was raw and exposed, and I didn’t know why. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Gabriel was a deeply messed-up individual, his criminal past notwithstanding—and he was a joke of a bass teacher, my ostensible reason for being here…plus he suffered from alcoholism and OCD and who knew what else (at least judging from the maniacal schlock I’d read). But he was wise. Wasn’t he? Or maybe not so much wise as intuitive…and definitely scary—but less in a sketchy psycho way and more in a $3.95-a-minute psychic hotline way…or…

“Look, Hen, you can split if you want,” he said.

I hesitated, thinking of what he’d written in his diary. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Do you believe in the supernatural?”

He smiled. “It depends. Why do you ask?”

“See, Emma and I have this weird history of dreaming the same thing. It freaked us out so much that we made a pact not to talk about it. But then she dreamed that Sarah came home, and the next night Sarah
did
come home. And then last night I dreamed…” I didn’t finish. I could feel my face getting hot.

For a long time, Gabriel sat very still, staring into space with a glassy-eyed, meditative look. “Sometimes coincidences get the best of you,” he said. “Have you heard about the woman who sold an old grilled cheese sandwich on eBay for thirty thousand dollars?”

I frowned. “Is there a punch line coming?”

“No, I’m serious. It had an image of the Virgin Mary burned into it. Think of it this way: I don’t believe that Jesus put it there. Do you? On the other hand, I’ve seen a picture of the sandwich. The burn pattern really
does
look like the Virgin Mary.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Gabriel?”

“Just this: If Emma is so in tune with your dream life and your real life, she
has
been hiding in plain sight,” he said. “It’s not a coincidence, either. I say go for it now, before it gets too late or too weird or too crusty, like an old grilled cheese sandwich. I didn’t mean to upset you, though, Hen. I know you’re going through a tough time.”

I laughed.

“What?” he said.

“I wonder what my parents would say if they could see me right now.” I looked down at my feet. “You know—if they
could listen in on this conversation.”

Gabriel took off his bass and placed it on the stand. “Honestly? I don’t think they would mind. Your parents love you, Hen. So does Sarah. I know they do.”

I swallowed. “I didn’t say they didn’t,” I said quietly.

“But you think they’re insane,” he said. “Who isn’t, though? Look, Hen, it doesn’t matter
what
your parents are. You’re closer with them than I ever was with mine. So is Sarah. I know, because Sarah told me how your family works. And no matter how crazy they are, or how much they drive
you
crazy, it’s always better to be closer than to be distant. That goes for Emma, too. Believe me, I know from experience.”

A small lump mysteriously began to well up in my throat. I blinked a few times, avoiding his eyes. Why was he telling me all this? I hadn’t asked to be lectured or psychoanalyzed—and I sure as hell didn’t want to hear his opinions about my family’s operating procedures. He was wrong, anyway: My parents
were
distant, at least when it came to talking about Sarah. “If Sarah is so close with us, then why did she run away with you?” I asked after a minute. “What made her do it?”

Gabriel shrugged. “To tell you the truth, Hen, I’m still trying to figure that out myself.”