Chapter 53
Elasticity of Human Desire
Ellis
The music blasted out of my laptop drowned out most of our talking in the sleepover but not even Adam Levine's ridiculously high voice could tune out the worries that had been a repeating track in my head.
Calista and Astrid were lying down on my bed, fetal position, talking animatedly while I sat in my study chair and stare endlessly in space, being unnervingly quiet- a characteristic that made Calista yelled over the sound:
"Els, why are you so antisocial? It's usually me who sit passively in the corner and hate the world."
"Sorry," I snapped out of my zone. Lately, I've been zoning out so much I just got a lecture from Mr Newman about how just because exams were over and I was perpetually a top student doesn't mean I could daydream and slack. Can you imagine that? Me, being called a slacker by my teacher? It's ludicrous. "I'm just thinking."
I've been doing that a lot- thinking. Tossing and turning memories and anxiety in my mind, because I can't get it out of my head. I can't get him out of my head. I felt as if he had coated me in the stardust that no doubt lingered behind his closed eyelids, and I'm stained all over.
"About Jem again?" sighed Astrid, her exasperation clearly shown: "Look, I love you, Ellis but the boy just lost his Dad....you need to give him some space."
"Yeah...but I'm worried about him. He hasn't shown up in school for the last month, skiving off-"
"That's typical Jem behaviour," Calista rolled her eyes, characteristically unsympathetic. "You're telling me our school's so-called 'bad boy' doesn't skive off school?"
"Yeah, but he was trying to make the effort to participate more and...I'm just wondering if he's okay."
"Ellis, it's been six days," reminded Astrid reasonably. This was weird. I'm usually the voice of reason. What was happening to me? "He's obviously not okay. He needs to be okay on his own before you can come in."
I hated how she was right.
"Anyway," Astrid cleared her throat, rising off the bed, "I'm going to go get some food. Do you want any?"
"Yeah, I'll have whatever."
"Specific," snorted Astrid.
I smiled and shook my head. "I'll have what you're having."
"Calista?"
"Mmm," mumbled Calista, muffled by the bedsheets as her face was planted in between a deep crevice she had created in the bed. She's splayed out like a giant pale white stain in the middle of the bed sheets. "I'll have whatever you're having too."
The absence of Astrid left Calista and I in silence- but a comfortable silence. The sort that didn't feel stifled with a thousand things we were too afraid to say- it was more like we were too tired and beaten to say them.
"Hey," I said sullenly, awaking both of us into motion. "How have you been?"
Calista laughed humourlessly, rising from her spot. Her blonde hair was roughly shoved into a bun so some wayward strands had escaped from her hairtie. "Why are you asking me? It's more like are you okay."
"Yeah but you know how I'm feeling..."
Calista shrugged, "I'm okay."
"Are you sure? You seem so...unbitchy these few days."
Calista raised her eyebrows. "Unbitchy? That's not even a word. That's deplorable, Ellis."
"I'm tired."
"So am I."
"No but really, are you okay?" I tried again, hoping she wouldn't evade it anymore.
"I could be better."
I looked inquisitively, waiting for a better explanation. She exhaled. "I just feel bad about being such a bitch and lashing out on you..."
"That can't be bothering you anymore, can it?"
"A little," admitted Calista and pursed her lips testily. "I just- I just don't want to talk about it, okay?"
"Oh, stop it, Calista," I ordered, "Don't do this- don't avoid and lash out at all your friends. Tell me. We've been friends since eighth grade. We're best friends, aren't we?"
"Well, are we?" retorted Calista, "I mean, can you tell me why we become friends in the first place?"
I couldn't honestly pinpoint a portion of time of when we exactly clicked. It sort of happened. "Does it matter? We just became friends. It doesn't have to do with any-"
"Exactly," interrupted Calista, "We don't have anything in common. You're all smart and an-overachiever and a teacher's pet and polite and a parent's dream while I get sent to the counsellor and even she said I was a contemptuous bitch. Let's face it, we wouldn't even be friends if you hadn't met me that day."
"So what? Opposites attract. Just tell me what's going on. It'll make you feel better maybe-"
"I just don't want to talk about it with you!"
"Well, why not?"
"Because you never give anything back!'
I stared.
"What?"
I felt as if I've been slapped.
"You have a perfect life," grovelled Calista, now determined to spit it all out, "And sure, Jem's all fucked up and I feel for you and sure, you didn't get an early acceptance into Harvard but it's not like you're totally out-of-luck. One way or another, you'll get in and my mom- God, my mom- she just wants to compare every fucking thing about me to you. But that's not your fault, fine. What I'm pissed about is that you want me to tell you everything about my personal life when you never even confided me about how your mom left and how you felt about that! Instead, you told Jem. The boy who, a year ago, you hated! I may be cold, Ellis, but you're so emotionless sometimes."
"Excuse me?" Emotionless? Me? Please.
Calista's blue eyes burned bright, even in diminished darkness, "How do you think I feel when you picked Jem to go to China to meet your mom? It's like you became a whole new other person- for him- and I'm not part of your life! You hang out with Jem through the whole summer and Astrid and I never even existed to you anymore.You never thought of telling me what's really going on with you, hiding your issues with your mom and your feelings from me while you expect me to tell you everything! Maybe try acting like you could trust me sometimes. In all our years of friendship, I feel like all I know about you is what everybody else already does."
"I don't owe you an explanation. I don't need to tell you everything about my life!"
"Then don't expect me to return a favour," she shot at me poisonously. "I don't owe you an explanation either so stop fucking asking."
My tongue felt like it had lost its ability to function. "How did this conversation get so wrong so fast?"
"I don't know, Ellis. I don't know."
A weird calmness has descended on me. Suddenly, I wasn't so angry anymore. I'm just trying to understand where all this pent-up frustration was coming from. "Calista, what's happening? Tell me why are you mad."
Calista's warm breath fanned out in front of her in a long exhale. "Ellis, we've been friends since the eighth grade. I thought we'll be the type of friends that told each other everything. You know, if you were facing troubles at home with your mom and Paige, you can tell me and I'll be willing to listen. I'm just...I feel like you're keeping shit from me and excluding me from parts of your life and we'll eventually be one of those girls who stop keeping up with each other once we get to college. Ellis, I've known Astrid for two years and I've known you for four and I know more about Astrid than you. I don't know anything about you, Ellis. I don't know your fears, what made you cried, anything. I feel like our whole friendship was sort of pointless and the reasons why we became friends...was because there was no one else to become friends with."
The whole Calista-getting-mad thing sort of made sense to me now. I had never known that was how I came off to people- to my best friends. Was that who I truly was? So obsessed with perfection and trying to achieve it that even my friends didn't know the real me, that I alienated them? So scared of letting people see my flaws and judge me on them that even the people closest to me never really know who I truly was, made them feel alien to me?
"I- I'm sorry," I said, startled at my own words, "I didn't know you felt that way...or that I'm like that. I just...I don't know."
"I'm sorry I explode," exhaled Calista, casting down her stare apologetically, feigning interest on the patterned bedsheets. "It's just...I'm really stressed."
"What's going on? You can tell me if you want."
Calista bit her lip. For once, a fierce or sarcastic expression wasn't twisting her features and she didn't look as intimidating as she normally appeared to be.
"I can't."
"Calista."
"Fine," Calista snapped, unintentionally mean and finally looking up and I swore her eyes became watery and moistened with tears, "My dad...he's got cancer."
-
I woke up to the sounds of sirens and Calista shaking me in the shoulder.
"What?" I groggily emerged from the platoon of blankets I've constructed with my army of pillows and bolsters.
"Your phone." Calista was curled up in a horizontal position just by the bedside where my phone laid, charging and attached to the cord.
I scrambled over from the sheets and reached for my phone. I turned my phone face-up and in the hazy stupor, I squinted to see who had called me. Jem.
This was the first time he had called me.
Reading his name on the display screen on the phone ripped me out of my fatigue-ridden desire to fall back into the darkness of dreams and stars and woke me up faster than anything else. I didn't hesitate a millisecond to swipe my phone sidewards to answer it the minute I realized it was him.
"P-por-cey?"
A tingle of anxiety, puzzlement and concern washed over me, making me double-up in shockwaves. He hadn't called me that since...
I don't even know.
"Jem?" This couldn't be good. He sounded like he had been crying. "What happened? Why are you calling so late?"
"I- i'm sorry."
Oh fuck.
"Jem. What's going on?" I desperately pushed the urgent worry in my chest into my words so it made him tell me.
"I'm- I'm really fucking sorry about Effy- I- I guess I was- was just scared that you- you- might be-" he hiccuped, "-something- I cared-hic- for."
"Jem." I ignored the hot pulse of flattered that strung down my throat and flung myself out of bed. Calista and Astrid were awake, watching me talk to him and their eyes were alight with their own version of worry. Astrid mouthed, Is Jem okay? I shook my head. "What did you do?"
"I- I don't want to be here anymore." The way he said it was so childlike- so traumatised.
"Jem, what do you mean? Don't do anything stupid."
Without even thinking of how much I would be in trouble, I pulled open the knob and expertly fled downstairs.
"I don't want to be here anymore." He had never sounded surer, more grounded on a decision and it scared me that he meant those in a more literal sense.
"Jem, please. Don't do anything before I get there. Don't you dare."
There was a pregnant pause. "Okay."
Relief seeped into my limbs and I stopped tensing. "Okay. I have to hang up now but I'll be with you soon. Where are you?"
"The playground."
I didn't even need to be told which playground. It was funny how someone you hated so much a year ago can share so much of an intangible connection with you that words didn't need to be spoken for you to understand. A touch or a sense was all you need. Maybe that was what love was- it should be unanimous without a need for complication or irrelevancy.
"Okay." I heard him hung up with the dial tone indicating it was time for me to go.
"What happened?" whispered Calista, her loose locks of blonde hair fell in strings from her top knot as Astrid peered over to listen intently.
"Jem." That only took one word to explain everything and understanding settled on their expressions.
"I'll drive you," concluded Astrid in a tone that says no arguments so I didn't try to tell them it's just my problem. She dived back into the shadows of my bedroom and manifested again with silver car keys jingling and shooting beams of silver out.
Unanimously, my friends and I piled into Astrid's car. We were a half-armed army of girls in our pyjamas and bare feet.
The heater sent out warmth in soft whooshes that encompassed the whole car but they never stopped me from quivering and chattering in the fear of what Jem was trying to do- I tried not to think about the worse case scenarios but the wild beating heart underneath my chest kept me wondering about if-
stop.
Astrid drove like a madman. Technically, there were no cars on the road but her foot rarely left the accelerator, forcefully pressing onto it as she steered the car expertly into lanes. Windshield wipers sloshed and cleared our glassed vision as she managed to drive fast without skidding on the icy wet road. For once, I truly appreciated how kind-hearted Astrid was and how much of a friend she was. Maybe she could be a little bit of an airhead and naive but she had a heart of gold.
When she flung us upon the curb, I wasted no time getting out of the car. It was raining. Lighting flashed and sliced the sky in half with a white-yellow jagged knife and thunder cracked. The pavement was hard, rough and cold, slicked with a dangerous and slippy wetness beneath the soles of my bare feet. A fleeting thought pondered how much of a mess I looked- if the neighbours ever came out. They would see prim and proper Ellis Chan in flannel pyjamas, no shoes and a bedhead looking for a broken boy in the rain and thunder.
I decided I wouldn't care anymore.
Falling in love with Jem was like holding the sun and hoping I didn't get burned. Except I wasn't just burned. My soul was now ashes and the remains were now in the wind.
Jem was nowhere to be found. The swings rocked towards the rhythm of the howling wind. The sound of the pounding rain hammered into my thoughts. The grains of bark stirred accordingly to the movement of my foot treading onto them. My eyes scanned, surveying the benches for a masculine figure. Not a sign.
"Ellis..."
"What, Calista? I'm trying to look for-"
"Ellis!" said Calista harshly, tugging me on my collar so roughly it nearly choked me on the neck, "Turn around and look."
The gasp couldn't come out. Legs flailed from the rooftop edge of the building opposite of the street facing the playground. Stripes of white from the black Converses. Jem.
"Jem!" I called out sonorously, vocal cords stretching to echo so I would be heard.
He didn't register me. Eyes closed, facing the darkened horizon.
"How do I get up there?"
Calista gestured to the fire escape located on the side of the building that was inside an alleyway between two trash cans. Without thought of the hygiene consequences, I threw myself into the alleyway and began climbing up the fire escape. I barely passed my PE class for climbing the rope ladder and it took some monetary convincing for my teacher to let me off with a C but the panic and the fear motivated me to keep pulling myself up the rungs no matter how strained my muscles felt.
"Jem!" He still didn't look at me. I just climbed up a whole fucking fire escape in the rain at 2 in the morning. "Jem, look at me."
"You shouldn't be here," he said, sombre, legs folded on the edge of the roof. The wind was a menace. My hair was flapping wildly into my face as I desperately pushed it out of my face and rubbed the water of the rain in my eyes. "You need to go home. You have a life to get back to- Harvard, college, expensive Thanksgiving dinners."
"So do you," I urged, "Come on, Jem. Just get off from there and let me take you home."
Jem didn't move, staying as dead as a rock. From behind, his elongated silhouette was cast onto the cement floor of the roof. He was counting the multitude of stars through fatigue-ridden eyes in an attempt to fall back into the realm of darkness and dreams- trying to sway with the wind, hoping that by an hour it would push him down to his doom.
I couldn't bear to think about it- Jem, dead. His lifeless body splattered on the sidewalk in blood and guts, his name just another cemetery honorarium on the newspaper, his life just another statistics on the death toll. I can't imagine Jem as somebody other than background noise- because he was such a big part of me, such an event that even if I tried to forget about it I wouldn't be able to- the remains of his love haunted me till the day I die and even in black ink, he was an event that still shined.
"Please, Jem." I never begged with such assurance.
The vein in Jem's neck twitched. "Don't use that tone with me."
"I use whatever tone I want to, Jeremy. Just get down from there and be sensible."
He snorted humorlessly in cynicism. "'Be sensible.' Like that was ever in my dictionary."
It seemed like one of our normal squabbles but it was more than that. He was more than that.
"Jeremy, get down. Please. I love you."
I didn't regret admitting it- I didn't regret saying something that had so much weight, so much profound in it just to make him listen to me, made him listen to reason.
And it worked. He jarred from the stoic stance he had maintained on the edge of the rooftop and slowly clambered down, easing himself down from the danger zone and onto the cement patch. He walked towards me and peered through the clamour of the rain as if confused if it was really me. I held his gaze like velcro, like a lifeline I was depending on. Maybe I appeared emotionless but I wasn't fucking immune to this.
"You love me?" He sounded like a small child like he didn't know what to expect for an answer. His hands were shaking when I gripped it and cold with numbness and rain. But I let the ice run through me and infiltrate my senses. I nodded mutely and without skipping a beat, I pressed a feather-light kiss on his lips. He didn't kiss back. I traced my fingers onto his chin and tilt it up so his eyes meet mine. I'm thinking in poetry when I look at him: Paradise is beyond the small gap in between your two front teeth. You strum my ribcage to the tune of a sonata, and my heart beats glow-in-the-dark. When you speak my name, soft, low, dangerous, it vibrates in the air for a few minutes before it dies. I love you, Jem Leighton, I love you.
"I love you." I press my hot breath against his collarbone, where he can wear it as a necklace.
"Ellis, you don't love me. You can't love me. I'm- I'm not good for you. You need somebody who can talk to your cultured aunts and uncles, you need somebody who can understand which fork to use on the dinner table, someone who could afford to go to college."
I didn't listen to whatever he was saying- mindless chatter from the buzz of whatever he had taken and pulled him into a tight hug. He was a quivering mess in my arms and I didn't know if it was his tears or the cold, I just know he wasn't okay.
"Don't do that, Jeremy. Don't say these things and push away the one person who loved you more than anything else in the world." I squeezed him tight and hard- me attempting to hold onto the Jem I knew, the Jem I loved and the moments of our youth.
"What the fuck is wrong with you? Can't you see that I'm bad for you? I'm such a shit boyfriend- a shit person to love, Ellis! Wake up! I can't love you- I don't deserve to love you! You have a shining future ahead of you- you shouldn't be wasting your time on a fuckup like me, who cheats on you, who hurts you! You should stay away from me! Get as far from me as fucking possible!"
"But I don't want to," I think I began crying somewhere along that but it was hard to tell whether it was the pelting rain or tears. "I just want to make sure you're okay! I don't want you to die!"
"Fine, then I'll get away from you!"
The rain was like bullets as I watched him fade off into the darkness, stomping over towards the edge of the rooftop.
I nearly lost my voice calling him, "Jem! Please!"
I ran to catch up with him, drifting behind him just by a few metres until I caught onto his drenched sleeve in order to stop him from getting away from me. But then he pushed me from him- ripped me away from him and the force of gravity landed me on the floor. I fell, hit my head and before I knew it, collapsed into unconsciousness.
--
oh well.
dedicated to liayle.
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