29⎜The Snow
“Can you hear me, Mom?” I questioned, wondering how the older generations were even going to be able to survive in few years with their evident technological ineptness.
She tapped on her camera so that all I could see was her finger, and then removed it, smiling lazily as she uttered a confused, “What, sweetie?”
“Can you hear me?” I reiterated, knowing that it wasn’t the connection on my end. I could see and hear her perfectly fine. If anyone, she was definitely the one doing something wrong.
“Speak up a little, will you, Eric?” she requested. She began to fiddle with some of the keys on her keyboard (the sound was distinct enough for me to discern), and then grinned broadly at a discovery she had made. “Sorry! The volume wasn’t up all the way!”
I sighed, and then laughed. “So, are we all good?”
“Yes!” she determined. “I can hear you, and also see your beautiful face. So, how have you been?”
“Good,” I told her, mutely wondering what people did before video chatting. Sure, when I was younger the advances hadn’t quite been made yet, but that was a simpler time. Now, I couldn’t even imagine a world without iPhones and FaceTime and Skype and Facebook and all those amazing things. It was a pretty great time to be alive.
“And with you’re, uh, problem?” she prompted. Right now, I was glad that she hadn’t said “drug addiction.” There were other people in the room. One of whom didn’t know that he had been rooming with an addict for the past few months. And I intended on keeping it that way.
“Fine,” I replied, “and how have you been, Mom?”
“Okay, but I miss you so much!” she expressed in sincerity. “Ooh! It’s actually snowing right now!”
“What type of snow?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” exclaimed my dear roommate, rushing over to where I was situated, at my desk. He came into the shot, and then demanded an explanation: “What do you mean ‘what type of snow’? There’s only one type of snow! It’s snow! Well, unless we’re talking about the other white, powdery stuff, like, cocaine or whatever, but it’s snow! How can there be more than one type?!”
“Mom, this is my roommate, Seth,” I briefly introduced the boy who had just interjected very strongly about the topic at hand. “Clearly, he has lived in California his entire life.”
“Just ‘cause I’ve lived in Cali all my life doesn’t mean a thing!” he pressed on. “It’s scientifically impossible for there to be more than one type of snow. It’s all…snow!”
“Actually, you’re wrong,” said a rainy voice. I was surprised that she was intervening, but technically she was from the East Coast, so her testimony was totally valid.
Seth shot her his best “I’m-majoring-in-some-sort-of-science-or-engineering-thingy-that-no-one-else-on-the-planet-understands-so-don’t-tell-me-I’m-wrong” look. “How?”
Ari sluggishly meandered her way over to my desk, and then sat down on my lap. Now, my mom could see all three of us, and (unfortunately) also hear us. “There’s good snow,” Ari began to explain, “and there’s bad snow.”
“But it’s all the same!” Seth exploded.
Ari and I began to shake our heads profusely, protesting his false accusation. There was a very clear difference between good snow and bad snow. Good snow was fluffy and light and white and pure and didn’t kill your back when you tried to shovel it. Good snow was nice and beautiful and could cause snow days to occur, but wouldn’t knock down a tree or put out a lamppost. Bad snow was thick and heavy and white and icy and almost impossible to shovel. Bad snow was unpleasant and destructive and could cause power outages and was annoying. There was a difference. A big one.
“Seth, you’re wrong,” I told him, and then I remembered that there was a gorgeous girl sitting on my lap that I would have to explain to my mom, because she was in full view of my mother who was only there because of technology and stuff. “Oh, and Mom, this is Ari, my…” I paused, unsure how to describe what she was in my life. The label we had given each other was a personal pronoun, so didn’t exactly work when speaking to the rest of the world.
Ari then spoke up, filling in the blank with a word I couldn’t conjure up hearing from her even in my wildest fantasies: “Girlfriend. Hello, Ms. Wilson. I’m Ari Remon, Eric’s girlfriend.”
“Well, I didn’t know that Eric had a girlfriend,” my mother managed to slip in a backhanded form of disapproval, sprouting from me not telling her something, “but it’s lovely to, uh, meet you—assuming that this counts as meeting!”
“It does,” I clarified for her, “and what type of snow is it?”
“The good kind,” she replied with a small smile. “You used to love the snow, Eric. Remember when you would go outside and build snow forts and sled down the big hill in our front yard? Or have snowball fights with your friends and see who could make the biggest snowman?”
“I remember, Mom,” I told her, the nostalgia hitting me uneasily. They were all good memories, but I couldn’t help but infuse them with the bad ones. The ones of how all those supposed “friends” who I had played with in the snow, now, would never even dream of talking to me. The ones of how all those friends had left me. We weren’t little kids anymore, and we hadn’t been for a long time.
“But the best part was always coming in to a warm house, and drinking hot chocolate as the snow fell,” Ari said, audible enough even for my mom to hear, three thousand miles away.
“Ari grew up in Pennsylvania,” I filled in for the woman who had brought me into the world.
“Oh, how nice!” my mom forced a pleasant reaction. I hadn’t told her about Ari, and now she was unsure as to how exactly she was supposed to act towards her. She hadn’t met her before, so in her mind, Ari could be the devil. She just didn’t know, so was acting guarded, just in case Ari turned out to be a serial killer that physically cut out my heart.
Thankfully, Ari was probably the sanest girl that I had ever “dated” (which was definitely saying something). Liz could’ve earned that title, but her rep kind of went out the window when she revealed that she was a nationally ranked basketball player, and was only keeping it a secret because of a bet. That didn’t exactly scream “stable” to me. Ari had issues, but she wasn’t crazy.
“Well, your father just got home, so I should probably get going,” my mom said, turning her head in order to look behind her. “Lovely chatting with you, uh, Ari and Seth!”
Ari just smiled, and Seth managed a hurried, “You too, Ms. Wilson,” before returning to his side of the room. Ari got up from my lap, allowing me at least some privacy with my mother. She understood.
“I’m so sorry that we couldn’t find you a flight in time for Christmas, Eric!” she apologized with a saddened sigh.
“It’s fine, Mom! I’ll be there for winter break about a week later, and then I’ll be home,” I promised her with the most reassurance that I could muster.
“I just can’t wait to see you, Eric! We’ll talk more later,” which was really code for “we’ll talk more later…about Ari.” I nodded, and smiled into the webcam of my laptop. “I love you, Eric. Stay safe. Call me if you need.”
“I love you too, Mom.” Then, the screen went dark, and my mom’s well-aging face was no longer there. It was just the desktop background of my flawless face (whenever I opened my computer, I wanted to see something perfect, so what else would fit besides my face?). I closed the electronic device, contentment that I couldn’t quite place overwhelming me within.
“That was really adorable,” Seth said sarcastically, walking over to the door with a single strap of his backpack shrugging off of his shoulder. “Now, I’m going to go leave, because I feel like you two are about to have sex, and watching would just give me unreasonable expectations for my own sex life. Bye.” He left, and I was alone with Ari.
The first thing she said to me was a solemn, “We’re not having sex,” and then, “but I wouldn’t mind making out with you right now.”
“Ari,” I hummed, unsure of why I was postponing the proposition she had just made—turning her down was an absolutely absurd notion.
“Hmmm?”
“What do you do for Christmas?” I found myself asking. Asking. It was one of my only weaknesses when it came to this girl. There was so much that I wanted to know about her, and the only way to find out was through the art of asking. Alas, Ari wasn’t a fan of answering, nor was she all that in favor of speaking, which was why I always got nervous asking her anything substantial or all that personal.
“Eat Chinese food and go to the movies, usually,” she said with an air of indifference that was different than her usual apathetic demeanor. Sensing that I didn’t understand, she elaborated, causing me a great deal of perplexity as I encountered a foreign concept that had never really come close to gracing a spot in my life: “I don’t do religion, Eric.”
My vocal chords acted on their own accord, relaying what my brain was thinking, though it hadn’t been meant to be verbalized: “What do you mean?”
“My mom was Israeli. My dad grew up Jewish—”
“What’s the difference?” Even though I knew that it was hard for her talk about her family, something still possessed me to interject, coming close to my personal quota of question marks.
“Israeli is a nationality; being Jewish is a religious affiliation,” she said, almost as if she had rehearsed the response. Then, she continued: “Anyways, when I was younger, I was raised loosely Jewish. My parents didn’t shove religion down my throat—my mom was against it, actually—and it just wasn’t that important.” She paused, and I decided that it was about time to go walk over to where she was (aka, my bed). I hopped on the mattress beside her, and lay down, somehow securing my arms around her waist so that we were attached. There was nothing sexual about our position, but it was intimate. “It came time for my bat mitzvah. My dad wanted me to have one, but my mom didn’t. I went to lessons and did all that stuff. Then…they, uh, were gone, and that was it.”
“What do you mean?” Damn, I could really be insensitive sometimes…
“After something like that, how can you believe in anything, Eric?” Her voice was hoarse, and sounded like a rough and never-ending drizzle. “They died, and I asked the questions that you’re not supposed to: Where was G-d? How could G-d let them die? Why didn’t G-d intervene?” I found her hand and squeezed it tight. “And I’ve been an atheist ever since. So, what do you do for Christmas?”
I was absolutely staggered by how Ari so skillfully was able to switch from something as heavy as her Godless life to something as trivial as my holiday plans. It was a trick of hers I had noticed that only appeared when something grim came up that she wanted to avoid. “Uh, let’s change the topic,” I mumbled, not wanting to get into a full-on religious conversation, even though we kind of already had. Thinking about religion and what I believed in confused me. The more I thought about it, the more doubt I had, and I didn’t want have doubt, so I just didn’t think about it. Well, tried not to think about it.
“Okay.”
“Tell me a story.”
“What about?”
“Anything.”
“Sad or happy?”
“Whichever.”
“Sad it is,” she determined. Aside from when we were kissing or when we were on the boat, there weren’t many times that I had witnessed Ari Remon be happy, so I wasn’t all that shocked when she gravitated towards the gloomier of the two. “Once upon a time, there was a girl. Her mom and brother died, and at their funeral, she didn’t shed a single tear.” I sucked in a breath, thinking that maybe this wasn’t the best activity that could’ve been chosen to pass the time. Kissing sounded pretty great right about now. “It wasn’t her fault, though—she just wasn’t good at displaying the emotions that she was feeling,” Ari went on, her voice steady and persistent. “Crying wasn’t going to bring her family back to life, but after that day, she promised herself that she would try to cry more, because she hadn’t cried when she was supposed to.”
“You’re too pretty to cry, you know that, right?” I muttered into her hair.
“Beauty has nothing to do with emotions. Or lack thereof,” Ari said, beginning to trace the edge of my arm that was draped over her.
“How about I tell a story now?” I proposed, hoping to change the mood back over to the snow or to something happy.
“Okay.”
“Happy or sad?”
“Sad.”
“Really, Ari?”
“It’s your fault for letting me pick.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so yawned a short, “Fine,” and then began to think. My life wasn’t filled with tragedies. Sure, I had suffered loss and regret and melancholy, but if I were to tell one of those stories, it wouldn’t even come close to being analogous to one of Ari’s stories, and it shouldn’t have had to. It was like group therapy back in rehab. Competitions about who had it worse shouldn’t have even existed. I didn’t want that to happen between Ari and me.
Because my life wasn’t sad due to fate’s choices but rather my own, the only genre I could think to tell involved drugs. I had a lot of stories about drugs. Using them. Selling them. Hiding them. Leaving them. I didn’t want to tell her a story about the times that I had ended up in the ER because of my bad decisions. Honestly, I didn’t really want to tell her anything about my past. Alas, I followed through on my words and told her a story. A sad one.
“It was my sixteenth birthday,” I started, shifting so that I was no longer holding her. Now, I was looking up at the ceiling so that I didn’t have to face her. She moved her finger from my arm to my stomach, and began to trace the muscles that lay under my T-shirt. “My mom had spent months planning it. Half the school and my entire extended family were going to be there. All I really wanted was a car, but I wasn’t going to complain about the party,” I gulped, not wanting to relive the memories that were flashing through my mind.
“My birthday finally came, and I got my car. It was a big black SUV. Gorgeous car. It’s back in New York, now.” I didn’t want to tell the part of the story that came next. It was too painful to remember. I was so awful. “Anyways, I, uh, got what I wanted, but I still had to show up to the party. About an hour before, a few friends came over and we got high. It was my birthday present from them. Then we went to my party—the party that my mom had taken so much time to plan and put so much effort into. I was high. Stoned. Bonked. I don’t remember anything that happened at that party, Ari.” I closed my eyes, and sucked in my stomach as she continued to trace. “To this day, my mom still doesn’t know that I don’t remember anything from my ‘sweet’ sixteen.”
Ari didn’t say anything, but I wasn’t really expecting her to. Instead, she just continued to draw along the outlines of my abs over and over and over again. The action sparked a question to appear within my mind, and I couldn’t keep from articulating it. “Why do you trace people?” I asked, causing the strange girl beside me to pause her tracing. Her finger rested right in the middle of my stomach, and then resumed its course. It was such an abnormal habit of hers, which I had witnessed her do to other people and to me. She only did it, though, to people close to her. This girl wasn’t the type to walk up to a complete stranger and start tracing their left earlobe.
She looked over to me, my green eyes connecting with her brown ones. “So that when they’re gone, I won’t forget them,” she said.
“What do you mean ‘when they’re gone’?” I questioned, not understanding her rationalization even a little bit.
“Eventually, everyone leaves, and when they do, I don’t want to forget them—both their physical body and mind—so I trace them.” That explanation was slightly better than the first, so I nodded, shifting my position so that my arm was hanging loosely over her shoulder as she leaned into me.
“You’ve known Scott forever,” I pointed out, “he hasn’t left yet.”
“But I left him, and eventually, he’ll leave,” she said in a somber tone of hers that gave me chills. “Everyone leaves.”
In an attempt to redirect the discussion to a less severe topic, I then inquired, “So then why are you tracing my abs again? You’ve already traced them before.”
She smirked. “Because that’s a part of you that I really don’t want to forget when you’re gone.” It was my turn to smirk.
“I’m not going anywhere, Ari.”
“You say that now, but you can’t guarantee it.”
I rolled my eyes. Of all the girls in the world, I just had to find a pessimist intriguing. Yet again, I changed the subject. “So, what’d you think of my mom?”
“She didn’t like me.”
“She doesn’t know you.”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t like me.”
“No, she doesn’t like that I didn’t tell her about you.”
“Fair enough.”
“Now, about you said to her…”
“What did I say?”
“You said that, uh, you were my girlfriend.” I bit my lip to suppress whatever emotion my face wanted to break out into at the single word that brought me so much joy. “Was that as in girl-space-friend, or girl-no-space-friend?”
She didn’t answer me initially, but rather twisted so that she was looking down at me, our mouths inches away. “That depends. Do you want to be my boy-space-friend, or boy-no-space-friend?”
“No space,” I replied in a millisecond. There wasn’t even a single doubt in my mind.
“Well then, I guess we’re boy-and-girl-no-space-friends.”
“I guess so.”
Then, I kissed my girl-no-space-friend (aka, Ari Remon comma Eric Wilson’s girlfriend).