“It’s about the mouse and the snake,” he continued. I tossed my crust into the bin. “There was this baby mouse that got lost in the woods. He found a snake coiled beneath a tree. He asked the snake, ‘Can I make my home here?’ ‘Next to me?’ the snake asked. ‘If you’ll have me,’ said the mouse. ‘You see, I have nowhere to go, and the forest is too big for a little mouse like me.’ The snake raised the mouse for seven days, providing shelter and warmth. On the seventh day, just as the mouse was waking from his sleep, the snake said, ‘I’m sorry, mouse. But the forest is too big for a little snake like me.’ And he swallowed the baby mouse whole.”
My mouth fell open. He had shocked me for the first time. “That sounds like the Edgar Allan Poe version of a nursery rhyme.”
“My moms used to tell me that story every day when I came home from school,” he said, fiddling with the camera strap. “I was sort of weird and nerdy and didn’t have any friends. Hard to believe, I know.” He grabbed a Twizzler and wrapped it around his finger. “I used to think it was a story about a poor little mouse and an evil snake. But then I realized what it meant. The snake wasn’t evil at all. He was just trying to survive. The world was just too big for him, too big for me.”
“That’s where you got your nickname.”
He turned to me, earnest and eager. “I think it’s the same way with caring. Caring about things, no matter how utterly wasted the effort, is just a way to survive. Everything we do is. It’s like that old saying.”
“What old saying?”
“You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.” He shrugged. “Might as well do, I guess.”
I wiped the pizza sauce from my mouth. “Maybe I should switch to Prozac.”
He laughed and ate his Twizzler. We didn’t say anything for at least five minutes. I guess we were absorbing, as Snake put it, “the sheer uselessness of our condition.” When I finally glanced at him, he was staring at me with that intrusive, pimple-analysis scrutiny I’d seen before.
“Keep staring and I’ll punch you in the jaw,” I warned.
“I’m guessing you’ve never had a boyfriend.” He smiled. “Guys stare.”
“I’ve had a boyfriend, thank you. He didn’t stare.”
“Then he wasted his moments. How long did you guys date?”
“A year. He moved to Vermont the winter before last.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll stare in his absence.”
“Fine. Let’s see how you like it.”
I scooted closer to him, my cold arm pressing against his warm one. His eyes were the dullest kind of gray-blue imaginable, boring and not particularly noteworthy in any sort of way. But they were nice. Beautifully average.
“I want to kiss you,” he whispered.
“Pump the brakes, buddy.” I leaned away from him. “This is the first time we’ve really hung out.”
“So?”
“So, you don’t kiss people on the first date. I’m not even sure I like you.”
“I know you don’t like me. You don’t like anyone. But I think I’m bearable to you, or else you wouldn’t be here.”
“Bearable doesn’t get kissed.”
“Did you find your boyfriend more than bearable?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“And I’m sure you kissed him . . .”
“Yeah, so what? We’d known each other since kindergarten.”
“Well, I’ve known you since Tuesday, and you already find me bearable. That poor sucker had to wait years for that milestone.” He inched closer. “I don’t understand this concept of waiting, anyway. You have to wait to kiss. You have to wait to get a job. You have to wait to grow up. You have to wait to live. All this waiting, and they wonder why we’re depressed. It’s because we’re always waiting for the moment that we won’t be.”
When he put it like that, it did seem pretty ridiculous. If I could get past his deformed tattoo and dumb T-shirts and relentless babble, I could certainly kiss him. And for some reason, he was determined to kiss me.
I reached for his neck and pulled his face to mine. My lips clashed into his in that awkward first-kiss way that everyone hates but endures to get to the slightly less awkward second. He tasted like strawberry Twizzlers. I probably tasted like pizza. He kept it simple, a hand against my back. None of that hit-or-miss groping that was nine times out of ten a miss. He kissed pleasantly, which was bizarre, because I wouldn’t have described him as a pleasant person. Compared to my ex, who kissed like a seizing fish (see: terrible kissers), he wasn’t so bad.
(Side note: In certain Western European countries, he’d probably be considered skilled. I hear they like weird tongue things there.) When he pulled away, he looked at me and said, “Tell me that wasn’t the best kiss you’ve ever had.”
“Eh.” I side-eyed him. “If kissing were an Olympic sport, you’d get, like . . . the silver.”
Honestly, it was closer to the gold, but he was too arrogant to properly process the compliment. Plus, my stomach was doing this weird flippy thing, making me sick in the good way. In the I-just-ate-the-world’s-sweetest-dessert-and-my-insides-are-going-to-explode way. If I didn’t force it down, I might have said something I didn’t mean.
“Well, I think it was sheer uselessness.” He grinned as the sun finally fell behind the hill. “We should do it again.”
Chapter Five
IF I NEEDED ANOTHER BULLET POINT to add to my extensive list of reasons to hate Flashburn, it manifested itself in Mondays at Hawkesbury. I sat in my advanced creative writing class with Polka, who was as generous with note sharing as he was with packed lunches. Every time we had a homework assignment, we critiqued each other’s work the next morning. For a guy whose native tongue was Taiwanese, he sure knew how to harness the English language. Which made no sense, considering he couldn’t speak it. He even helped students with their projects after school sometimes, one of them being Carla Banks, whose giant dinosaur baby made it impossible for her to sit upright in the slim desk in front of me. She was facing the aisle, her swollen cankles resting on a metal chair across the row. One of her on-again-off-again besties, Olivia, was making it clear that their friendship was certainly off again, twisting to the side so her back was to Carla and her face was to the blank wall. I might have pitied my former co-worker had her on-again conversations consisted of more than beauty advice and dietary regimes. I might have even sat next to her just for kicks. But the Carla-less silence was too peaceful to wish away with surface pity.
At the front of the classroom, the whiteboard spelled out the same assignment it had since the week before. It was a definition paper due at the time of our final. A definition paper defining anything we wanted. Our own take. Our own words. It sounded easy enough in theory, until I started writing and realized I wasn’t as smart as I thought. During one brainstorming session, I tried to define exercise. Literally, exercise. I was hitting new lows.
“I think I write about freedom.” Polka was thinking out loud, adding ideas to his anime-stickered monstrosity (see: laptop).
“Freedom? That’s a good one.”
“You write paper yet?”
“Not yet.”
“What you write about?”
I rubbed my hand along the desktop. “I don’t know.”
“I can help you,” he said. “I tutor in cafeteria on Wednesday.”
“No thanks.”
Polka had been offering to help me with the paper for weeks, but I always shrugged him off. If there was one thing I didn’t need, it was anyone’s help.