It’s chewing on glass and spitting out blood; it’s being awake for twenty three of twenty four hours; it’s swallowing codeine by the tablespoon because you can’t stop coughing; it’s stained cigarette fingertips; it’s losing baby teeth you never knew you still had; it’s getting punched in the gut on a loop; it’s being the person to seek instead of hide; it’s being able to be forgotten without anyone being afraid that it would happen. That’s what falling in love is.
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I love you: he’s always the first to say it, follow up with this romcom laugh and, “just kidding. It was a joke.” It never was a joke. His mother taught him that you never toy with a girl’s feelings, because she’ll come back to bite you in the butt. He grew up with five sisters—making him an expert on all things tampons, estrogen, and feelings. That was what he told people was his special skill, along with being able to knit a pair of socks in just under two hours, so long as no one bothered him and he was allowed to have these marathon knitting sessions where people in the dorm all crowded around him to watch because they hypothesized that he had lightning fingers, gifts from the Gods that meant he was good at doing the handsy stuff. They had to be strong fingers, too, from all the power knitting he did. By the time he was ready to turn the heel on the second sock there would be whispers of cheers to come and it always made him feel like an Olympian. He got girls to like him, this way. Because he reminded them of their Nans and the way they always sent woolen socks that they would never wear because they scratched up against their legs and gave them rashes. He never made socks out of wool; socks and sweaters were how he said ‘I love you’ when he couldn’t manage to choke it out. His tongue would block the words from coming, or his throat would swell up so those three syllables were stuck underneath a trap door of psychosomatic reaction.
He hands the socks off to the only person in the room who was ignoring him, pretending to read her text when she was really scribbling pictures of dicks and dick eating monsters in the margins. She already owns approximately fifty pairs of his socks and fifteen sweaters and a small box full of hat and mitten sets. But he hands them to her anyway and the corners of her mouth tug up to look like a smile. “Not exactly my color, Wes.” they’re made out of stretchy pink chenille. Westley frowns, forming a question mark with the simple motion. “I mean, they’re great. They’ll go nicely with those pink leg warmers you knit me for winter. But—pink. Pink. Not flattering on a red head.” A triumph of self delusion, he notes. Bullshitter extraordinare. Pretty girls always do that thing where they talk about how unpretty they are. Westley doesn’t understand it, because if people tell you you’re pretty then shouldn’t it sink in? At least until it’s gone off like a broken record that keeps spitting out the same line of you’reprettyyou’reprettyyou’reprettyyou’reprettyyou’repretty and it’s stuck like that. You have to accept it. Wes looks her in the eyes (trying to see if eyes really are the windows to the soul) and pinches her cheek.
“You’re beautiful, Emmeline Vance. Even more beautiful than Grace Kelly.” In between lectures on how to treat women right, his mother talked about how Grace Kelly was the woman. The one that every girl wanted to be; every boy wanted to be with her. But Emmeline just blinks and moves her head away from his hand. He’s fifteen and barely understands the way that girls work, no matter how many times his mother explains it, or how many charts and diagrams his sisters give him. “Stop trying to push past the boundaries, Westley. They’re there for a reason.”
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Westley wants to tell her things like, I’ll scale your Great Wall of China; I’ll battle the bulliest bulls in Spain. I’ll do a funny dance; I’ll make you a scarf long enough to wrap around a giraffe’s neck three times. I’ll watch all your movies and I’ll sing all your songs. I’ll be poetic. Am I poetic? God, just tell me what I’m supposed to do for you.
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What’s weird is when she doesn’t want anything from him. No spinning plates or balancing spoons on his nose. No eggs over easy in the morning or setting her alarm and back-up alarm for her before she goes to bed. No darning her socks and sewing patches onto her dresses that have lived through air raids and nuclear bombings.
“Sit down, Thomas. You’re making me dizzy. You want a beer?” She talks like she’s from one of those American movies set in the city—underneath the layers of an accent twenty-one years in the making— and she’s wearing one of the London Blitz dresses. Purple, with crisscrossing straps and a skirt that hits too many inches above the knee. Westley adjusts himself on her couch and clears his throat. “Yeah, I’ll take one. One of whatever you’re having. So if you don’t want beer—something else. Water?” her laugh echoes off the walls of her kitchen. There’s the clinking of the icebox and the fizz that comes after popping the tops off of bottles. She hands him his by the neck of the thing and he takes it just so he has something to do with his hands other than sit on them so he keeps from fidgeting. The needles looped with a fresh squash of yarn in his bag seems inviting. But he’s trying to stop relying on the habit. Just like he’s trying to stop relying on a lot of other things. Diamond rings on fingers and the support of a family who has stopped returning his letters. Disappointment.
Wes brings the bottle up to his mouth, knocks it against his teeth, holds the mouthful of shit for a few seconds before swallowing. “You have a nice place,” he offers.
Marlene McKinnon is the kind of person that throws her head back when she laughs, unashamed of showing off the lolling tongue and tops of her back molars. “It’s a shit hole, but it’s home. More than you have, right?” She means it as a joke. He responds with a long pause.
“But I guess living on your sister’s couch is better than sleeping on a bench in the park.” Again, a joke.
He rests his drink on her floor, there’s no coffee table to speak of, and pulls the length of yarn out of his bag. Even better than taking a hit, probably. Less dangerous. More rewarding. Seeing those plastic smiles on peoples’ faces when they lift out another shawl or throw blanket or ickle pair of baby booties. Her cheeks puff up with hot hair so she looks like a blow fish. Exhale. “You need a new vice. Smoking. Something.”
“I like knitting. It keeps me calm—not so angry at myself and the world and everyone. Because I guess that I zone out and nothing else matters? So I’m not thinking about how my parents won’t speak to me and Emmeline got the happily ever after she doesn’t fucking deserve, and that I’m sleeping on a real life bed of shame because of it, even though my fiancee was happy to just be together even though I shit all over the whole entire—” she stops him by sucking the rest of the sentence out of his brain. Giving him mouth to mouth and telling him to shut up and does he want to watch the Exorcist or Carrie, but putting in Carrie before he answers because he’s taking too long. When she sees how he’s sitting there all deaf, dumb and blind, she curls her arms around his middle and breathes into his chest: “I’m not your head shrinker, Westley Thomas. I’m just your friend.”
