Cover Road:Cover - Teen Ink

fic•tion
46
Improvising by Onjuli Datta, Hastings, England
Hi, I’m bored. What are you doing?
I read a pretty book today. No, not just
today. I’ve been reading it for three weeks
because I read slowly. I’m not stupid, though. I
just don’t like missing things. If I think I haven’t
completely gotten something, I have to re-read,
re-read. Shall I re-read you?
The book was pretty. I said that already, sorry.
You said, “Hey, I love that book. Cool.” I’m sure it
was a flippant comment, because you’re made of
those – you radiate them – but it made me want to
cry big fat attention-seeking tears.
You read fast. Whenever I give you anything,
you whizz through it. You think whizz is a funny
word, it makes you laugh when I use words like
whizz.
I want to go to sleep and wake up and find that
you’ve called me, but instead I just pick up another
pretty book and read it all night and prove to myself
more and more that you’re wrong. You call me
and say, “You read too much,” and I smile and say,
“Yes, I do.”
I listen to bad music sometimes and you tsk and say,
“No, listen to this.” Music is your passion. I think you
worry you’ve offended me when you’re nasty about my
bad music, which is nice. When I turn off the bad music
and play one of your “more than just noise, this means
something” songs, you say, “You’re kind of cool,” and
my heart turns into a hot air balloon. Float, float, whizz.
I thought about you saying that over and over. Can
we run away together? You have a lovely way with
words.
Your music is so much prettier than mine, and it
makes me smile big, so I worry you’ll think I have ugly
teeth. I don’t have ugly teeth. I want you to tell me that.
Will you tell me that?
I’m sorry, but I wish your teeth were ugly. Your teeth
are so, so perfect. I’m so, so sorry.
Do you remember our meeting? That sounds like it
was a pre-planned corporate event, like it was a thing. It
wasn’t a thing. You said, wasn’t I a friend of a friend?
And I said, “Maybe of a friend.” You laughed. The truth
is, I doubt I was even a friend of a friend of a friend.
We were vague and unconnected and hopeful. You said
I was funny. I made you laugh.
I re-re-re-re-recorded my answer phone message –
that means I did it five times – after you left me a
message, the premiere, the number one (“Hello. What’s
up?”). You left the first message on my answer phone
and I thought my voice was wrong.
I want to record the sound of your voice when you
laugh and print it on a T-shirt, paint it on a wall, etch it
in my brain.
Your second voice message ever said, “I liked your
old answer phone ….”
I’m so, so sorry. I tried to re-re-re-re-record it like
how it used to be, but it wouldn’t play right, it wasn’t
the same. It was just wrong.
You told me your dog died and it made you sad. I
want to buy you a dog that won’t ever, ever die. An
immortal dog. I hate dogs; they’re smelly and ugly and
they bite and they’re similar to people, but I would give
Teen Ink • APRIL ’09
Photo by Megan Bonini, Cincinnati, OH
you an indestructible dog. Completely in-vin-ci-ble. If
I couldn’t find one, I’d build you one. I’d put my hair
into a ponytail to get it out the way and then I’d build
you one out of coloring pencils and the grass we sat on
this afternoon and the screen of my phone when it says
ONE VOICE MESSAGE.
And I said to you the other day, “I have a secret” –
because I wanted to be interesting and you looked tired
of me. Were you tired of me and the stupid things I was
saying? I wanted to say, “Are you listening? Can I keep
talking? Do you just let me bore you?”
“… And then someone said we couldn’t take the A
train because it didn’t stop close enough and we’d be
too cold to walk, and did you know I
have a secret?”
I said it like that.
You said, “Do you?”
Do I? I nodded and bit my lip and
you bit your lip and smiled, but I didn’t
take any teeth away from my lips. I
thought, Ugly teeth! but I still didn’t
stop biting my lip until you said, “What
happened with the train?”
You wanted to know what happened with the train.
And then I blinked like I’d been hit, but I’ve never
been hit – you know that, I think. I might have told you
that. You can’t tell – you don’t understand that flinch.
It cannot be pinpointed. Still. I told you my boring,
boring story and you asked more questions and I
blinked more and more and more.
My lip hurts this morning because I woke up and
there were NO MESSAGES and I chewed and chewed
and blamed it on the trains and my inane rambling and
secrets and other girls you prefer.
My secret is that sometimes I wonder about your
lips, because I don’t really know anything about them.
No, I know a little about them. For instance, the border
between the lips and the surrounding skin is referred to
– by whom, I don’t know – as the vermilion border. The
vertical groove on the upper lip is the philtrum. The
skin between the upper lip and the nose is the ergotrid.
Ergotrid – you’d like that word.
But that I could read in a book. What I just cannot
pick up from a passage of writing is what your lips feel
like. I can only wonder. I think they’re like the paper
birds I used to make with my friends when I was small
enough to believe in fairies and dreams and nightmares.
And your lips are like the red flowers spilled on the
floor of my apartment. And they’re like a thunderstorm
that reverberates, making more-than-just-noise music,
and the lightning spells out our names across the sky.
That’s what I think. People make me crazy sometimes,
and I want to kiss you.
There’s a party this evening that I might not go to.
You don’t call me sometimes. I know I have to come
to terms with that. That makes me laugh, coming to
terms. Terms aren’t really a thing you can come to,
arrive at. If you dissect it, it doesn’t make sense.
At this party they had fries, so I ate some because
parties make me tired, and I licked all the salt off my
fingers in case someone saw and thought I never
washed my hands, that I was disgusting. I am disgusting.
I couldn’t wash my hands right then, because you
said, “Have you drunk anything?” And I said no and
drove you home, and you said I was too skinny in the
same way you said I read too much.
I drove you home and my car felt warmer when we
talked about bees and stars and Traumatic Childhood
Events. Your breath came out white and misty, exhaling
phantoms to prove you weren’t a ghost.
We are both connoisseurs of road safety, or at least
we like to think we are. So you only grabbed my hand
and squeezed it when my car was parked nice and safe
outside your building. You had such a strong grip,
People make me
crazy sometimes,
and I want to
kiss you
super-human strength. You’re my hero – can I kiss
you? You grabbed my hand and squeezed, and I said,
“What,” because I couldn’t analyze the situation and I
was hoping you could shed some light. Like a butterfly
shedding its cocoon.
After seven lifetimes you replied, “Nothing,” and oh,
you have a lovely way with words and you’re so polite
but you need to stop lying when people ask you questions,
because then they try to dissect you and it doesn’t
make sense, and after a while you let go and leave.
The next morning I was awake when you called
because there are some nights when I just don’t sleep.
You said you read something you liked. You wanted me
to read it. We chatted on the phone and
didn’t talk about it and didn’t talk about it
and didn’t talk about it.
My car felt cold this morning. It just
doesn’t make sense.
You said my music isn’t good enough
for me, and you gave me these CDs. Lots
of the songs are love songs, but then, lots
of the songs in the world are love songs,
so it doesn’t mean anything.
The songs you sent me catch in my throat a little, and
one of them says “Don’t let go,” and it hurts that you
think you have to tell me that, hurts like my lip when
you don’t call.
I said to you, I liked the song, the “Don’t let go” one.
And you said you liked that one because of the instrumental
between the lyrics. And you never held my hand
again, and I never even thought about it. But that’s okay,
because I still listen to it lots and lots and lots and I
don’t. I don’t let go.
I was ill today and tomorrow and the day after that. I
floated around in fragments, thump-head, achy teeth,
and chapped lips. My eyes felt warm and open and
blurred. Resting in a bed felt like resting inside my own
mouth outside my own skin and ah, my head. My skin
felt like flannel and I remembered the cough syrup I
should have taken.
You sent me a note to say get well soon but didn’t
visit. This – this whole you-not-visiting isolation television
imagination situation – this was expected. I was
ready for your casual negligence; I always am. Back in
my fever, my throat burns and it’s setting fire to my
mind. I’ve been staying up too late. Three whole days
in bed with too much sleep, and you don’t even visit. In
my head, to pass time, I relive things. We dance. You
grab my hand.
And then I’m better, I’ve gotten well soon like you
said. I don’t smell like vomit and I’m good as new.
You say, “Oh, you’re so pale.”
I say, “I was ill,” and you nod sympathetically and
you mean it, I think.
The next time my hands touched yours, you came
to hang out with me for an hour or so and I wasn’t
nervous but I managed to drop a plant because I’m so
clumsy. On the floor was this plant, snapped and earthy
and its pot was broken. We danced around it and the
soil between my toes felt golden and bright, like a
sunset.
After about an hour or so, you went to see another
person, and all I know about her is she doesn’t have a
silly secret about you. And she’s not pale. That’s all I
know. She’s your friend. I’m the person who accidentally
dropped a plant with red flowers, red flowers like my
stupid secret, and it made you laugh and you said, “Let’s
dance,” and I thought, Oh, so this is hanging out?
You are a catalyst, I decided. Catalysts are chemical;
they are unchanged by reactions and they make things
happen. They can work together with heat, or oxygen,
or continuous stirring, but sometimes they will kickstart
the buzzing fizzing all on their own. They don’t kill
people, catalysts. Catalysts speed things up. Come
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