We Won't Feel a Thing (7 page)
Read We Won't Feel a Thing Online
Authors: J.C. Lillis
“I’ll miss this,” said Riley.
“Please.” Rachel summoned a smile. “This time next year you’ll be surfing on Venice Beach with some blond girl named Harmony. You won’t even know I’m gone.”
Riley glanced around their room. Everything belonged to them equally and seemed impossible to split—the twined roses in their flowerpots, the yard-sale novels and old etiquette guides they read out loud at bedtime, their music library with her Zuzu Omari and his Modern Shirts songs on permanent shuffle together.
There will never be a Harmony,
he thought.
A sharp beep sounded on Rachel’s desk. She sprang to her feet and dashed to the laptop.
“Step One,” she said, seizing the screen. “It’s here!”
Chapter Five
Dear Rachel and Riley (I won’t ask why you lied about your names in our initial meeting; the desperate have their reasons):
Thank you for the forms and the safety deposit. I apologize for not delivering the equipment personally; official WAVES business intervened and devoured most of my day. I hope you weren’t taken aback by my associate, Tilly Merriam. She can be quite a challenging guest, particularly when she’s been listening to audiobooks of urban fairy tales and her head is stuffed with piffle about Magic in Everyday Places.
Never mind that, though. On to
Step One: Screening & Assessment.
Rachel and Riley sat at her desk in front of their laptop, side by side but a full six inches apart. Riley rested his chin on the handle of the clear umbrella David had given them.
Rachel scrolled down.
For this step, you will need the two tablet computers in Compartment 1. On your tablet, you will complete a fifty-question Forbidden Love Screener that will help determine the severity of your problem, so your interventions can be auto-adjusted to your needs.
Simply plug in the tablets, press button 1 to load the screener, and follow the instructions onscreen to complete and submit your responses. (After the screener is loaded, you may unplug the tablets from the console as you work.) The screener will be scored and results returned to you, typically within 60 minutes. Be patient—as you will discover, it ends with an essay question, which must be analyzed and scored by hand.
PLEASE NOTE:
In my fourteen years of work co-developing WAVES, I have noticed an issue with new clients. Faced with the unfamiliar rigors of the program, they soon feel foolish and neglect to complete the steps correctly. Therefore, I will send with each step a helpful example, using myself as a case study. For the purposes of this demonstration, I have fabricated a hypothetical forbidden attraction to Tilly Merriam, who—let us suppose—is not only dreadfully wrong for me but is also pre-engaged to a beef-brained lackwit who named his guitar after a whiskey and uses phrases like “How’s it hanging?” without irony. Please click the attachment to view my filled-in sample form and fictitious essay.
“Shall we click?” said Rachel.
“Have at it.” Riley gripped the umbrella tighter.
SAMPLE FORM
Please answer the following questions re: the object of your forbidden love (hereafter referred to as “The Object”) as quickly and precisely as possible.
1. Romantic ruminations about The Object derail my concentration an estimated
8
times a day, and for an estimated average of
17
minutes.
2. On average, it is
76%
likely that I will work The Object’s name into any given conversation, even if it has nothing to do with him or her.
3. I have experienced or will likely experience the following negative side effects as a result of loving The Object in a non-platonic fashion:
Jealousy
X
Loss of self-respect
X
The death of hope
X
Major disturbances in family harmony
Impaired judgment
X
Night sweats
Surrender or compromise of future ambitions
X
Other:
Forty-seven more questions followed. Rachel and Riley skimmed until they got to the final item:
ESSAY QUESTION. Write a brief essay that uncovers the root of the problem: the ONE incident you feel is MOST responsible for nudging your feelings for The Object in an unhealthy direction.
They nodded. This would be difficult, but they had experience; Mrs. Woodlawn loved assigning them essay questions. Underneath, David had typed:
For the sake of this example, let’s say it started on September the twenty-third, at a vintage Formica table in Tilly’s ridiculous fourth-floor walkup. Imagine I had come to review a pamphlet she had written and designed for WAVES. I was preparing for a confidential meeting with the Green-Eyed Monsters, a floundering support group for sufferers of professional jealousy, and I needed the materials to be perfect.
We sat by the window with her laptop. She wore a green dress with red polka dots. A damnably sultry song floated from her speakers, the chipped china plate in front of us held sixteen oatmeal scotchies that smelled of childhood, and her gray cat called Webster purred figure-eights around my pant legs, threatening to charm me.
“I like this part very much,” I told Tilly. “The part that reads ‘Ten times faster than behavior modification…Seventy-six percent more productive than talk therapy.’”
She nodded. There was a stillness to her that surfaced only when she worked. “But…?”
“But you’ve misphrased the key selling point of WAVES. The end goal isn’t to ‘zap away your feelings.’ It’s to free yourself from encumbrances.”
“Ah. Encumbrances.” She tapped careful notes. “Allrighty.”
“You don’t agree?”
“I said allrighty.”
“But you want to say more. Please. Talk to me.”
She grabbed a cookie from the plate and took a thoughtful bite. Then she leaned in close, so close I could smell her Mango Madness shampoo.
“Personally, David? I don’t see the benefit.” She searched my face with her tediously beautiful eyes. “I use all my feelings for something. Even the bad ones—they fuel creativity, determination. I let them all live with me.”
“Yes, but most—”
“Nope! Stop right there. You don’t have to justify yourself. My job isn’t to argue with you.”
“No?”
“It’s to understand you.”
I felt myself smile. She smiled back. No woman had ever smiled at me quite like that, or displayed such a cheerful willingness to understand me. I experienced a dreadful surge of passion, the likes of which I had not experienced since I was sixteen and Lotte Schimmel kissed my cheek in the science lab the day before winter break.
And then, at approximately 1:36 p.m., Tilly Merriam choked on an oatmeal scotchie.
I acted fast. I remembered the precise calibrations of the Heimlich maneuver from my rustic days as head counselor at the Future Scientists of America Day Camp. She stayed in my arms for a moment afterward—breathing deep, murmuring thanks into my clavicle. And in that moment I knew: the exquisite miseries of romantic obsession, so long departed from memory, had come to roost once again.
Her idiot Brit of a boyfriend came home then, clomping up the stairs in black steel-toed field boots. This was Hitch, florid of face and yellow of hair, an uncommonly large head atop a compact, muscular body. He looked like a bobblehead of a street thug. He watched her straighten her dress, then cocked his head at me. You could see him trying to put two and two together, without the aid of his fingers. He said something indecipherable that started with “Oi!” and ended with a wet cough I hoped was terminal.
It figured. The worst ones always made off with the best girls. Tilly’s hand brushed my shoulder, as if she’d read my thoughts and wished to apologize for the natural order of things.
“This is David,” she said. “I think he just saved my life.”
Riley shifted in his seat.
Rachel tapped a pencil on the edge of the desk.
“Aw,” Riley said softly.
“It’s a hypothetical example,” said Rachel.
“You don’t think this happened?”
“David’s love life is irrelevant
.”
“Look at this score,” said Riley. “He got a 1,784.”
“I’m sure our scores won’t be that high.” Rachel clicked CLOSE and the document vanished. “I mean, I’m not
obsessed
with you.”
“I’m not obsessed with you, either.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Let’s start,” said Rachel.
“Now?” Riley chinned the umbrella.
“It’ll be fun.”
“I need to fix the wave mosaic. Miss Laurie’s picking it up in—”
“Let’s fix us first.” Rachel plugged the tablets into the console and jabbed button 1. The tablets blinked, then flashed SCREENER LOADED. She unplugged them and passed one to Riley. “I’m thinking we work straight through till we’re done. No talking, no snack breaks, no bathroom breaks…What?”
“You’re a very cute taskmaster.”
“Okay, I’m putting an embargo on compliments.”
“Sorry.”
“Let’s set a time limit.”
Riley thought. “Two hours.”
“For real?”
“Essay questions take time.” Riley bit at his thumbnail. “Also, I might write mine in sonnet form.”
“Ri, if you don’t take this seriously—”
“Okay.” Riley held up his palms. “No jokes. I promise.”
Rachel set the mermaid clock for two hours. She stared at Bob and Athena, at the hairline fracture where their hands met.
“Do you hear that?” said Riley.
“What?”
“That sound.” He shuddered. “Like…drums.”
Rachel tilted an ear to her window. She thought she heard it too—a hollow thrumming sound, like bongos in the near distance. She went to the window and shoved it open. Nothing. Normal Donnybrook Lane sounds: wind shushing through cottonwoods, the
bzzt bzzt
of the neighbors’ bug zapper, a faint tingle of brass windchimes. A full moon peered through the trees in a sinister shade of red-orange.
It’s watching us,
she thought, and then pinched herself for being irrational. She shut the window. Then she locked it, too.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
***
With fifteen minutes left on the clock, Riley gnawed the remnants of his thumbnail, stuck on the end of the essay. Sniffles perched on his art desk. Riley blinked at the poodle’s rheumy eyes, at the drop of glycerin his father had lovingly pearled in the dog’s left nostril. Dead animals had been staring at them for years, but there was something especially sad and sympathetic about this one. He reached over and stroked the coarse gray fur lightly, so his fingers wouldn’t register the body’s lack of warmth. He’d always wanted a real dog.
It’s okay, boy,
he thought, feeling silly and tender and wrung out.
Everything’ll be okay.
He watched Rachel finish on her side of the room—she was always first to complete their homework. The decisive blip of her
submit
button deflated him. She zipped up her red sweatshirt with the silkscreened ravens, the one she always wore when they fished for sunnies at Solomon’s Pond in early fall, and Riley wished he were writing about the Peloponnesian War so he could ask her for help. She plucked her feather barrette from the seashell jewelry box he had made and clipped her hair back.
“Going downstairs for a bit,” she said, grabbing their laptop. “You want anything?”
Riley tugged at his deviant curl. He eyed the strange moon outside their window. He wanted everything. He wanted to say something perfect, something that would make her walk over, take the tablet from his hands, and shock him with the kind of kiss he practiced by himself late at night underneath his blue plaid comforter, his index and middle fingers standing in for lips.
“I’m good.” He forced a grin. “Tell the deer heads I said hey.”
When she was gone, Riley tapped out an end to his final paragraph and hit
submit
before he lost courage. He set the tablet face down on his mattress and went back to work on his tidal-wave mosaic, trying not to think about the questions he’d just answered with terrifying truthfulness. Somewhere deep in the mysterious headquarters of the WAVES Collective, David or someone else (not Tilly, please no) was reviewing his questionnaire and discovering all of his guilty secrets: what he had named his theoretical children with Rachel (Maisie and Max), the exact degree of jealousy he had suffered when the odious Chad Armstrong had ferried her to his Valentine dance and she’d come home in different clothes (99 out of 100), and the estimated number of times per day his romantic visions derailed his concentration (58).
And that essay. He’d spilled so much. He’d laid out their whole beginning with the kind of dreaminess that aches to be spoiled, like a writer setting up for a terrible ending.
The mermaid clock dinged.
Time’s up.
Across the room, Rachel’s tablet glowed on her bed like a hotel pool at night, still and smooth and begging for trespassers.
What had she written?
Her cheeks had been pink when she’d pulled her hair back, and Rachel never blushed.
Riley craned his neck. He really should check, just to see if he’d done the assignment right. He was not an authoritative writer; when his mother reviewed his personal essays and opinion pieces, the margins were always full of red notes like WATCH HOLES IN LOGIC and WEAK TRANSITION HERE.
He glanced at the clock. Above the dollhouse, the wishing heart tinked against their window.
One peek,
ticked Bob.
To make sure you didn’t screw up.
Agreed,
ticked Athena.
You want an accurate diagnosis, don’t you?
Riley tweaked one last glass shard and set down his mosaic tongs. He crossed to the other side of their kingdom, tiptoeing on bare feet, and sat down carefully on Rachel’s bed. When they were children, the bed belonged to both of them; it was a neutral surface for playing Go Fish and Battleship and acting out the death scenes in the Harrowhaven trilogy. Now everything about it whispered
forbidden
: the sleek softness of her gold velvet quilt, the black silk robe in a heap by her pillow, the luminous screen that flaunted her essay.
