Some Side Effects May Occur

2. Healthy Volunteer-2

I close my scroll to look at her. She’s staring at hers, but not at anything in particular, scrolling mindlessly through the apps.

“Who, Twit?” I ask.

Twit is our replacement for Craig’s name since it was banned from conversation. It stands for “The f**k Was I Thinking” or “The f**k Were You Thinking,” depending on whether Sophie’s the one talking or not, and it’s pronounced Twit either way.

The F is silent because it got too hard to say, and because Twit suits him.

Sophie shrugs as if to say, who else?

“Nah, not like before,” I say.

I only got two emails from Craig all last week. I got about that many an hour when they first broke up.

“Not that I care what he’s saying or doing,” says Sophie.

“I know,” I lie.

“It’s just, I thought he’d be doing a little better by now.”

“Yeah, see, caring how he’s doing is a lot like caring what he’s doing.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yeah, it really is.”

“No it isn’t! It’s not like I miss him.” She shudders. “Not anymore. I mean, if there were a way I could never see him again, make it so he never has to see me again, I’d do it, no problem. It’d be better for everyone. But the way he’s still pining….”

I scoff my disagreement with her choice of words.

“I’ll kill you if you repeat this,” she whispers. “It felt pretty awesome at first, like, ‘wow, I’m a big enough deal to break someone’s heart.’ That was maybe the first twenty minutes, though. Since then, it feels like s**t. And it’s even worse knowing that I felt the first part.”

“Well, then good news,” I tell her, “Twit’s not heartbroken. He’s egobroken. Everyone knows guys don’t have hearts.”

Sophie giggles and then instantly looks guilty about it.

This is Philosopher Rachel taking over, not Clown Rachel, but unfortunately their voices are nearly indistinguishable.

“Look around this room,” I say.

“What about it?”

“Just look. What do you notice about the people here?”

Sophie sits up, takes a glance at the gathered drama club members, and sighs. “About three quarters of us are girls.”

“And more than half the guys are dating each other, so they don’t count, because they’re different, and they’re off limits for us anyway.”

“Okay, so….”

“So,” I continue, “why do you think that is?”

“Because guys get teased worse than we do if they sign up for drama?” Sophie proposes.

“Do they? It gets Aaron plenty of attention, almost all good.”

“Aaron’s hot and talented. He could sign up for cup stacking and it would be cool. He’s the exception.”

“No, he seems like the exception because he’s all we have.”

“You’re saying he’s not hot and talented?” Sophie challenges playfully.

“No,” I try to keep sounding objective. “I’m saying he barely has to be. Tons of mediocre guys could make out great for themselves in theater if they decided to take advantage of how badly we need them here, but they won’t. Know why?”

“I know you’re about to tell me,” says Sophie.

“Because theater is full of girl stories. Music. Stuff that comes from the heart, and it doesn’t speak to them. The few guy stories we do aren’t worth sitting through the rest for them.”

“I prefer my theory,” she says.

“Yeah, I would too. But it doesn’t explain the movie theater effect.”

“Movie theater effect?” Sophie prompts me resignedly.

“Movies are made out of guy stories and girl stories, right? And you can always tell which ones are which. You can look around the room and see what kinds of people are there, who’s being dragged there, who’s doing the dragging, who’s there to see their hopes and dreams and fears and stuff on the screen and who isn’t. And what are all the girl stories about?”

“Uh… girls?” Sophie guesses.

“Hardly. They’re about love. Crazy, mushy, knots-in-your-stomach, hurl-yourself-off-a-cliff-for-someone love. And they’re girl stories because guys can’t feel stuff like that. Except in stories. They feel it in girl stories, because we like to imagine they can so we’ll feel less pathetic and alone.”

Sophie’s stifling her laughter at me. “Where do you get this s**t?”

“Think about it!” I’m propping myself up against the chair with my right elbow in my “on” posture, larger than life, here to entertain. It’s reflex, even when I wish Sophie’d actually listen to me. “Do we have anything in common with the girls in guy movies? Are we hot, flirty, selfless-”

“Speak for yourself,” Sophie snorts.

“Do we live to cheer the guys on while they ditch us to go do something more important than fall in love? Something epic and b****y and mind-numbingly boring that apparently makes them feel something that I sure as f**k can’t?”

“I can feel the joy of explosions and saving the world, thank you very much,” Sophie argues.

“Okay, fine but do you see yourself as their… I don’t know, bonus eye candy?”

“Hell no,” she admits.

“So why should we expect real guys to be what we want them to be in our stories?”

She considers this, barely.

“Because how else would there be tons of real life devoted couples that get married and grow old together and stick it out no matter what?”

I shrug. “Guys have needs.”

And so do I, I think to myself in the secret, filthy attic of my head, watching Aaron stretch into a full split onstage, but there isn’t a single version of me in my repertoire crazy enough to say so in as many words.

“Why rock the boat when you’re getting what you want?” I say. “And just because they can’t get hurt the way we can doesn’t mean some of them aren’t decent enough to not want to hurt us.”

“Oh, what a generous thought,” Sophie rolls her eyes.

“I’m not saying relationships can’t work, just that they’re-”

“Shams?”

“Kind of.”

Mrs. Cornwall calls a hush over the auditorium and directs the leads to the top of a scene in need of particular polishing.

Sophie and I turn back to our scrolls.

Her texts start popping up on my screen seconds later.

Sophie: What about our dads?

Sophie: They love us.

Sophie: You think they don’t love us?

I text back.

Rachel: Sure they do.

Rachel: Mine loves me a whole lot more than he loved my mom, apparently.

Rachel: Different kind of love. Doesn’t count.

I’m reminding myself more than trying to convince her now. This is all I can expect of a guy of my own generation: l**t, noble obligation, and eventually, hopefully, a habit too comfortable to break.

And I will find a way to be okay with that.

Sophie: You know, “guys” are a very different thing from “TFWIT.”

Rachel: Aha! So we agree that if there WERE guys who could be heartbroken instead of egobroken, TFWYT wouldn’t be one of them?

Sophie considers this.

Sophie: I’ll think about it.

“You’re off the beat, again,” Cadence interrupts the scene onstage.

“There are how many directors?” Mrs. Cornwall says in her dangerous voice.

“Sorry, but it’s distracting me!”

“Which beat am I missing?” Aaron asks with slightly overdone earnestness. “The basic four and four,” he demonstrates a brief, flawless, and far more intricate tap sequence in four and four than anything the beginner’s score of this play calls for, winning a few quickly stifled snorts from the rest of the club, “or the even more basic four and four?”

Cadence rolls her sparkling eyes at him. “Here, let me show you the feel of it,” she insists, and Aaron shrugs her hands off him, a little too fast for someone who’s still trying to pretend to Mrs. Cornwall that he’s never even dreamed of dating within the troupe.

Mrs. Cornwall’s eyes narrow. “Take five,” she says. “Let’s get the quartet onstage.”

Everyone knows Cadence and Aaron are immune to the dangerous voice, Cadence because her mother’s donations pay for pretty much all the sets and costumes the state budget would never spring for, Aaron because male triple threats are really hard to find, but they’re both professional enough to look chastened as they slink off the stage.

Aaron shakes the argument off like it’s a layer of dust on his dance-sculpted shoulders and hurries to the row behind Sophie and me before Cadence can try to talk to him.

I scoot over a seat so he can jump over and plunk down in the one between us.

“Thanks,” he whispers under the quartet’s discordant warmup notes.

“Any time.”

This seems to be my primary function in the world so far: to stand between prettier people than myself and their romantic misjudgments.

“I’ve got a new game,” says Sophie, holding out her scroll to us in invitation. “It’s multi-interface.”

Aaron takes his own scroll from his pocket and unrolls it, flicking the catch to make the eight-by-ten screen flatten out and harden, then taps it against Sophie’s like a toast to link them together and start the game download.

I reach across him to do the same, self-conscious of how close my arm passes to his chest, and how my cheek almost brushes his naturally gold hair with just the right amount of curl.

Sophie bites her lip at the way the cracked plastic backing of my scroll rattles when it knocks against hers, and the slowness of the progress bar once it starts downloading, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s offered to get me a new one before, and I can’t pretend I can get by without any favors, but I won’t take more than I need. This one still works for now.

Besides, I’ll have to customize Ronnie all over again when I upgrade.

Finally, the game starts silently across all three of our scrolls, my screen becoming a baffling array of bright colors. A scrawl of text in the corner instructs me to arrange the blocks into a recognizable image before the timer runs down.

Before I can decide whether they lend themselves better to a fire engine full of broccoli or an apple tree being buried under a lava flow, another bubble of text interrupts.

Sophie: How about we test the theories? Tell him.

I tap it closed in less than a second and angle my screen away from Aaron, who’s thankfully engrossed in his own sheet of colored blocks.

Sophie smirks slightly on his other side but doesn’t look up at me.

Rachel: Yeah… no.

I’m not delusional.

The habit Aaron has for hanging out with Sophie and me isn’t the romantic kind. The three of us were all in the same summer program right before freshman year, his first year after moving down from Oregon, so we started high school together as our own little support group.

Aaron doesn’t actually need a support group; when you look like him, the whole world lines up to be your support group, but I guess when everyone wants your attention, maybe it’s nice sometimes to have a protective barrier of glorified extras that people like Cadence (and whatever few guys he happened to beat in this semester’s auditions) can barely be forced to talk to at gunpoint.

Not that I would know.

Sophie: Bet you a slice of pie he’ll feel a hell of a lot about it.

Rachel: Yeah, he’ll probably feel enough to make him puke.

Sophie’s fantasy about guys secretly falling madly in love is harmless enough when it’s about her. With her “oh, I just threw this on” kind of cuteness, she’s the most comfortable habit Penner will ever have the chance to develop, so she can live happily ever after whether it’s true or not.

Her fantasy that Aaron is secretly madly in love with me is another story. She’s been trying to convince me to plunge myself back into non-good-natured laughingstock territory by declaring my undying love for him ever since it worked for her with Penner, back when she finally snapped out of the Twit incident.

It never seems to cross her mind that Penner was an agoraphobic who seemed to be spending his considerable allowance on nothing but videogames and facial scrubs before the two of them got close, and Aaron Hawking is… Aaron Hawking.

Sophie: Come on.

Sophie: What do you have to lose?

Six more months of this, I think, glancing across at the two of them, but I don’t type it.

Sophie and Aaron are two of the biggest reasons I don’t want to drop out of school, but they’re not the only reasons.

Sacrilegious as it is to say while dodging Craig in the halls, watching Aaron spiral around with Cadence in their perpetual makeup-breakup cycle, and waiting on the edge of my seat for my chance to prove myself in the real world, I actually like high school.

Everything’s graded on a curve here, and on that curve, I’m adequate.

Classes are easy, for what they’re worth.

With my grand total of two friends, I’m not popular, and I’m not beautiful, not yet, but Clown Rachel’s antics help control the flow of the laughter than comes my way, and my remaining extra pounds and awkward features are common enough for me to go unnoticed the rest of the time.

I no longer attract the special snickers and nicknames I used to in the couple years after my parents split, when I first found myself unattended and free to eat whatever and whenever I wanted, before I understood the consequences.