It doesn't take me long to realize that Gethsemane is not wearing pants. I can feel the bare heat of her knees against mine under the table in our booth. She's only wearing a checked men's dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top. She could be wearing shorts, but if I'm not imagining it, I can smell the raw sweat and depth of her, uncovered.
I look down into my coffee to hide my blush. It's pitch black and scalding, a twin to Gethsemane's cup. I ordered for myself, but just as I was about to choose a Caramel Macchiato, I felt her eyes on the back of my neck, not judging but wondering. She was trying to find me out. Everything I do seems to be cataloged in her brain.
How strange, in a world where no one cares about anyone, to have someone watch me so closely.
She's doing it again, now. Her green eyes are still as undisturbed wells, following my hands. I finally work up the courage to lift my eyes and look at her. "How are you?" I ask. My heart skips a beat as we stare at each other.
She displays her youth for just a moment while she considers -- her eyes relax and her lips pout, an eighteen-year-old soul rising to the surface. It's easy to forget how little she is, since I feel like such a child in her presence.
"I am," she says. "Aren't you?"
I want to say something dumb like, aren't I what? but I opt for a head nod instead. Yes, I am. I suppose so. She takes a gulp of coffee and I imitate her. My mother told me once that when you want someone to like you, you have to copy all of their postures and movements; everyone likes a mirror.
Maybe Gethsemane doesn't, though. She looks at me over the rim of her mug, so intensely that she's almost glaring. "You have a good face," she says suddenly.
"Oh." My cheeks flare red again. The heat of her is so near that I almost feel stifled by it. Her knees are still and warm as sleeping kittens, but I can hardly keep from bouncing mine. My body buzzes with agitation and my heart palpitates like a flicked butterfly. "Th-thank you."
She draws her eyebrows together and looks down. "Sorry," she mutters. "Was I not supposed to say that?"
I clasp my hands under the table. There's static electricity between the hair on her bare legs and my pants. I can feel the hairs gravitating toward me, a subtle but powerful pull. I could just bump into her, connect us . . . "No, no," I assure her. "No, that was very nice of you. It just . . . surprised me. People don't usually say that." My blush crawls down my neck and over my ears like an inextricable species of ivy.
"Sorry," she repeats. Her face is sad all of a sudden and my heart thrashes with guilt for having made her feel this way, She is beautiful in her melancholy, lips falling into deep corners in her frown, eyes covered over with thick awnings of confusion, eyebrows arched in distress. She tells me, "Sometimes I say things I'm not supposed to. It's because I have Asperger's Syndrome. That means that I'm a high functioning Autistic." These words come as stiffly and automatically as if they had been read out of a textbook. I wonder to myself how many times she has said them before.
Autistic. It isn't surprising -- the word had actually crossed my mind during our last text conversation (admittedly, more as an abstract adjective than a diagnosis). She is looking at me again, waiting for my judgment, my pity, my verdict on whether or not she is worth the rest of my time. Of course she is -- if anything, I love her more. I can't help thinking of the autistic kids in Teagan's playgroup; my favorite is an eight-year-old boy named Jacob. You can sit on the floor and talk to him for a whole hour, just listen to him talk and talk and talk, usually about outer space. He doesn't get up and wander off like the other kids.
It's in Gethsemane, too, that staying power. She is grounded and present, completely focused on the task at hand. She isn't deciding what she is going to say next, waiting for me to be done. She's not thinking about the past or the future, she's not wishing she was somewhere else. She is entirely here. If that's Aspergers, I don't know what makes it a "handicap".
I've often thought the same thing about Tig. How can you ask what's wrong with her without seeing all the things that are right? Who wouldn't want the type of child I have, the type born inherently happy, innately content, with such sweet features and such simple love? Her neck is "too" short, her mouth is "too" small, she learns "too" slow. How could you say any of that? Why would you ever compare my wonderful, exquisite child with all the others -- how can you cheapen her by saying she doesn't live up to the prototype, the perfect kid? All I can do is hold her and hope she doesn't know what people think.
I want to reach over and take Gethsemane's hand, but I can't be sure how she'll react. Instead, I smile. "Okay," is all I say.
"Sorry," she says again as if she's short-circuiting.
"Don't apologize for yourself."
"Okay."
We drink our coffee in calm silence. The booth warms, entrapped with our body heat like we are twins in a red vinyl womb. People come into the cafe and leave it, all the same to us. Well, to me. Gethsemane watches them all, stalks them, even.
I feel honored to have been inducted into the circle of people who know her, the people who are allowed to know who she is -- not just strange, not just fey, but completely other. I can see it now, why she looks so close. She studies people as they pass, a practiced research. She is studying them, watching the way they walk and talk and move. To understand a person is so difficult.
She is gathering my energy from the heat of my knees, I can tell. My scent, the overripe apple and coconut shampoo that surrounds me have all been logged, the texture of my skin and hair, the way I tasted when I kissed her. These things, things that I could also know about her, had I not been so worried considering my own end of things, are how she knows me. She knows me so well.
"You do have a good face," she says again after a minute. She taps her nails together, a movement that reminds me suddenly of the softness of her downy mattress, the shocking strain of her chest under my fingertips. The old saying comes to mind: you don't know what you have until you lose it. What wouldn't I give to touch her like that now? Why did I eject myself from her bed so quickly when I had been given full reign to explore her body, to control it? The opportunity is gone now. Her nails click against each other like computer keys in a long sentence.
"Thank you," I repeat, smiling to myself.
She nods and looks me over, eyes roving from the very tip of my hairline down to the open top button of my blouse. She takes in everything in between, my thin lips and bag-surrounded eyes under rectangular glasses. "Can I take pictures of you sometime?" She requests. "I need a new model."
I feel my eyes pop with surprise and admonish myself for it. She's not going to think you have a nice face anymore if you keep pulling those awful expressions, I tell myself. "Oh," I say. "Well, I don't see why not."
I've never liked having my picture taken. As a child, my mother had no greater joy in her life than forcing me into poofy tulle dresses and shoving me into the Sears family portrait studio next to my brother, who stood straight-backed in a tiny shirt and tie. The only thing that made me more uncomfortable than the photo shoots themselves was actually seeing the photos that came out of them. I despised the image of myself in that dress, peeking out like a red-cheeked cherub in a cloud. I looked more like myself in my cargo shorts and t shirt, long blonde hair twisted up into a baseball cap. Mom never liked it, but my dad told her to take a step back -- just let her be, he said. And she did (sort of), until high school when the growing bubble of her anxiety culminated to a whole new wardrobe and an hour-long lesson on how to wear makeup. It felt like playing dress up. Playing dress up every single day, all day, until after hours and hours I could finally lock the door of my room and strip it all off to lay in my bed in my boxers, legs and arms spread like a hopelessly beached starfish.
Nowadays, I can't even do that. The girls burst into my room willy nilly like paranoid cops, and Wes is always watching.
Gethsemane nods. I can't help feeling that she has seen my entire life, my past given to her by my movements and smell and words like a disk inserted into a computer. "It won't be bad," she tells me, as if she can see my fear. "You have the best kind of discomfort in your skin. It's lovely."
It's hard to know what to say to her. "Thank you," I hardly whisper.
She grabs my hand, the one resting on the table next to the salt shaker. Turning it in her own like a palm reader, she strokes a finger over the lines in my palm. "I want to strip it away," she says. She traces each of my fingers with a touch light as a feather. "And see what's under this."
My body goes stiff and still as a petrified possum as she extends her touches to my wrist and forearm. What's under this. I feel sweat, the sweat that comes from having someone too close. She's right there in front of me, and if I'm not careful, next thing I know she'll be in me. She'll be under the mask. I catch her hand in mine and wrap my waxy, white fingers around her thin, golden ones. "Okay," I say. "Alright."