The Half-Life of Planets (10 page)

“So anyway, Asperger's syndrome is characterized by difficulty with social skills, and also by intense and often narrow interests. Which I guess is what music is for me. It could be worse, I guess—there was a kid in my social skills group who knew everything about public transportation. Routes, schedules, the whole thing. He rode buses for fun. At least I don't ride buses. Oh yeah, I tend to babble. I guess you noticed that. I'm doing it now. I know all these rules, but it's like…Do you take Spanish?”

“Yeah.”

“So I can have a conversation in Spanish, right, basic
cómo estás
kind of stuff, but I'm constantly thinking about the rules and whether I'm messing it up, and the thing is for me that conversing in English is kind of the same thing. Not that I'm worried about verb tense or anything, but I just have to always be thinking about the way that most people expect a conversation to go and remind myself to do those things. And sometimes when I'm nervous or something, like right now, I forget and just babble, which I guess I'm still doing.”

I stop and take a breath. I look at Liana, but not for too long. People find that disconcerting. She stops walking and sits down on the beach. I keep talking. “The thing about the East Coast is that you can't watch the sun set over the ocean. I'll bet that would be cool. I've seen sunrises, of course, over the ocean, but never a sunset. Are you angry at me?”

Liana stares out at the sea. “Oh God, no, Hank. I'm not—” She laughs. “I was going to say ‘What would make you think I was angry?' but I guess—”

“Yeah, I'm pretty much flying blind. You just seem different.”

She sighs. “I guess I am. Listen, I should get home. My parents have people coming over, and my dad's, like, actually here for a change, so I should go.”

“Okay. Are you sure you're not angry?”

“It's one of the only things I'm sure of right now.”

“Okay, then,” I say. “Bye.”

“Bye,” she says. I wish I could say I stare out at the sea in contemplation of my romantic longing, but the truth is I look at her butt as she walks away. Finally Liana and her butt are out of sight, and I realize I don't know if I'm going to see her tomorrow. Or, for that matter, ever.

I slide open my phone and send her a text message.
Coffee tomorrow?

I walk home, and my phone stubbornly refuses to ring. I spend a long time while I'm walking scrolling through menus, making sure I haven't missed her response. Nope. There just hasn't been any. Maybe she's busy making dinner and can't hear her phone.

When I get home, my stomach is churning with worry. I just hope I don't have to see Chase, because he'll tell me that I should never have told her. And then Mother will tell me that a girl who doesn't like me for myself doesn't deserve me anyway, and I will think about how lonely and sad I am, and about how I don't care if somebody deserves me or not. Maybe I will cry. It seems possible.

I open the door quietly and walk up the stairs to my room, skipping the third step where the split wood creaks when you step on it. When I reach the top of the stairs, I see Chase coming out of his room. I silently curse my luck.

“Hey, stud!” Chase says, smiling. I am trying to work up enough energy to smile back when my phone gives a loud beep. I whip it out, open it up, and read the new text message from Liana:
Absolutely. And thank you for telling me.

Now I don't have to fake my smile. Chase looks at me and looks down at the phone and shakes his head. “That's how it starts, my man. That's how it starts. Now you're on the leash.”

He ambles downstairs, and I head into my room and flop onto the bed. Five minutes later, I realize I'm still smiling.

My mother's office is all about pamphlets.
She stores them at home and carts them to the school guidance office when they run out or if there's a special assembly or something. They are stacked up on the white shelf near her desk. Got herpes? You can read about it here. Need to choose birth control? Grab a leaflet. Friendships getting you down? Boyfriend treating you like dirt? Pressures from parents hurting your psyche? Perhaps you need a pamphlet. I have never read these pamphlets. I have never so much as unfolded one of the cream-colored booklets with bold lettering that reads:
Dating: Am I Ready?
Or
Cutting: Why It Really Hurts.

From the open window I can smell the burgers on the grill, hear my dad's loud laugh, but not the reason for it. Probably one of Bill Abramson's jokes. One he'd edit if I were down there too. Parents are different when they're around their friends—and with Lauren and Jacob Abramson off at summer journalism school and camp respectively, I feel totally out of place among the parental realm. So much for leaving Hank for a family dinner. I study the pamphlets on offer, still not touching them.

When we were sophomores, Cat once snagged one and did a dramatic reading for me. I still remember her overly concerned dictum:
And if you cannot resolve such issues as these on your own, please do yourself a favor and seek guidance
. That's the main point of all the cream, blue, green, white, yellow, and pink pamphlets—to make you see my mother. She's the guidance counselor at Melville West, where I go, but I don't see her at school except to avoid her in the hallway, or, before I could drive, I'd meet her at her faculty parking space for a ride home. The same is true for her home office. My mother comes in here when she's finished her daily baking regime, but I steer clear of this room because it feels too much like I've done something wrong. Or I'm being judged or something. The pamphlet collection has expanded—Cat would be thrilled. I scan the titles:
Peer Pressure, Drinking: Decide for Yourself, Drugs: Are They Worth It?, Why Am I Alone?, Is My Body Making Decisions for Me?
I swear, whoever has the job of writing this crap could use a tutorial.

Then I see what I came for. With my bare feet on the plush beige carpet, I stand on my tiptoes to reach it.

“Do you need something, Liana?” My mother is at the doorway, her khaki shorts crisp, the collar of her light pink shirt folded down. She sees my reach but doesn't respond to it.

I grab the blue paper and pocket it. “Nope—all set,” I say, and wish for just one damn non-closed-off second she'd rush over to me and hug me and smooth my hair and say something like,
Whatever it is that's bothering you we'll solve it
.
Let me help you
. But she doesn't. Because the framed social work diploma on the wall and the placard on her desk say it all: she is a professional.

I leave the adults to ponder such questions as mustard or mayo, and head to the front steps, where I sit, burger-on-English-muffin in hand, to read what I suspect will elucidate nothing. My eyes read the words but they seem to be skirting around the issues.
Often, communication is difficult. Have you ever tried to get your point across to someone but felt as though your words were not being heard?

I take a bite of mustard-covered burger, swig at my seltzer water, and try to find something resembling anything worthwhile on the page. Last spring, for extra credit, I wrote essays about particular scientific problems—issues of weight and matter, confluence of electricity in weather patterns, predictions for environmental conditions based on preexisting criteria. Franca Lorenti, the Italian science maven who was at the school for a semester, taught me one important lesson: to properly facilitate scientific discovery and examinations, one mustn't be confounded by too many words. Basically, cut to the chase.

Finally, the back of the pamphlet tells me what I want to know. Everything else was pretty much what Hank had told me on the beach. That he has trouble interpreting gestures or facial expressions, and might move his body oddly. Suddenly the magic of his hands always working chords starts to vanish. His speech—the way it sounds staccato almost, overly thoughtful—isn't so much the product of intense musical passion; it's just a syndrome. People with Asperger's have hampered social skills. As I reread the paragraph, I put Hank in wherever there's another pronoun. Hank has hampered social skills. Hank has a developmental disorder that affects his ability to effectively communicate with others. Hank has an all-absorbing interest in particular topics such as doorknobs, French literature, trains, and Victorian glass. Then I take out the last part and put in music.

My butt feels cold on the stone steps, and my feet are dotted with mosquito bites. All the citronella candles are in the backyard with my parents, and it appears that every single insect that can fly and bite has charged to where I'm sitting. I swat at the air with the pamphlet, my mind retracing all the words, all the versions of Hanks. The earth seems to rupture when you find out something about someone that you never knew. Something huge. And I'd bolted from the beach like I'd bolted from Pren Stevens and Jett Alterman and boys before them, but not for the same reason. I had to get home for dinner, right? And maybe Hank does have these rigid patterns they talk about on the page in my hand. Maybe he does know way too much about who played on what album and which guitar changed the face of rock as we know it, and maybe he'll never be one of those people even if he wants to be.

I clear my soggy paper plate to the sink and take note of Dad's orange blood-pressure cuff (real name, sphygmomanometer) on the kitchen island, front and center yet again. He actually keeps a log of the risings and fallings, charting the systolic and diastolic. When I see the cuff out, I know he'll be home for at least a few days; otherwise he'd keep it near his suitcase. I give a halfhearted glance at his column of numbers and see a big red check—everything's A-OK. Shocker.

My mother finds me on my way upstairs to my room to finish my notes on today's lab work, which I never did because of being with Hank.

“Thanks for dinner, Mom,” I tell her. She waits for me to say more, and I contemplate spilling the info about Hank, but I worry she'll get all guidance on me and offer the pamphlet I already read.

“So this is about your new friend?” she asks, flicking her eyes on the telltale blue paper. She drops her shoulders. “I saw you in town with him the other day, I think.” She puts her hands to her lips as though smelling something or maybe wishing she hadn't told me she'd seen me; it's too bizarre to know your parents can find you outside of the house.

“You were spying on me?' I ask, but not angrily.

“I too like to indulge in iced coffee,” she explains. “Am I allowed?”

I nod. “I guess.”

“Anyway,” my mother says, wrapping up our talk with a voice that makes me feel like I'm in one of her sessions at school, “you like this boy?”

My insides twist.
Like
. Like? What a lame word. “Sure.” I wonder if she'd rather I'd grabbed the one on drinking or cutting—perhaps those would be preferable for her daughter's “new friend”? “It's just a pamphlet, Mom.”

A smile toys with the idea of spreading on her face, but she doesn't let it happen all the way. “You just make sure…” she starts. “Just…well, you get extra information. The pamphlet is meant to be a launching point. You know, for further discussion? Because sometimes people do try and sum people up with a label, or…or they let single words make them—”

I groan, “God, Mom.” She raises her hands to ask what, and I give her a perfunctory kiss on her cheek and head upstairs to graph stars. It's like she is incapable of making the leap that maybe I wasn't talking about myself with the pamphlets. That I meant Hank.
His
one-word definition.

Later, I get outside and tilt my head up to the open sky and look at the moon, noting its position in my book, the cluster of stars, the constellations. Hank is so much more than what any pamphlet could say. He has his quirks, his chording ticks, his sky-infinite knowledge of music, but who am I to say that's bad?

I look at my parents' window to see if maybe my mom is checking up on me here, minus the iced coffee. But she's not. I shake my head at her even though she can't see the gesture. Then—right then—I realize my mom sort of had a point. The one-word summing up with “slut” could just as easily replace the one word of “Asperger's.” You cannot define someone like that, at least every aspect of them. The feeling swarms over me, giving me chills, making every pore of me know for sure this is true. The note is wrong. Sitting on the porch, I make plots on my graph, careful not to smudge the ink with my left hand. A plane goes by, blinking in the darkness, an object out of place among everything else up there.

The night air is warm, just enough to make me want to linger, and I do, writing more in my notebook:
Stars within a typical galaxy are so far apart that the chances of two colliding are slim to none. But in some dense regions, known as star clusters, they are much more likely to cross paths.

From my back pocket, my cell phone bleeps and I debate not checking it but then give in.

Looking forward 2 coffee 2morrow.

I find myself reading the text two ways: the way I would have if Hank had never told me about the Asperger's, which is “He's probably half excited for coffee and half trying out his new phone.” And the way I will have to reexamine everything now that I know. Because, like it or not, everything is different. Even if I want him to be the same, I've read the pamphlet. And read it late. What if he'd told me right away, way back when he showed up in the bathroom at the hospital? He seemed so cool then, unflappable, unflustered. But with the pamphlet on my desk, that scene is changed: he's semi-unhinged. Not really aware of his environment so he bursts in where he shouldn't be.

Just like maybe he shouldn't seem all broody and intense at Espresso Love. Just like he isn't edgy on the beach, more nervous. I sit with my knees pulled up under my T-shirt and stare at the text and how to decipher it. I want to say it means something more, that each and every word and gesture from him is now this big cloud of diagnoses, but I only come up with the same thing as if he'd never told me: he's just excited for coffee and is trying out his new phone.

But it isn't totally the same, and I want to shake things up. Isn't that what Hank said? That he should try new things? Or at least that's what Chase said he should do. So instead of analyzing the text any further for cues that Hank himself probably wouldn't even recognize, I text him back. The pamphlet detailed the patterns set up by kids with Asperger's, how routine is important, or needed. But Hank showed up at my lab. He broke the coffee routine we had established. And we went to the beach. And I brought him my mother's vanilla hazelnut brownies at Planet Guitar. So he's capable of fracturing the patterns. Just like I am.
Forget Espresso
, I write. Forget Planet G. and the lab and all the other places we've been so far. Forget all that faux intensity I was putting on you.
Blow off work and meet me at the Arcade at ten a.m.

A century ago Melville was this seaside escape for people from the big cities. They built big wooden houses with wide porches to rock on, elegant oceanfront hotels, and quaint streets like Ocean Boulevard. Tiny cottages like the one where Hank lives were thrown up in a construction frenzy—places for the average people to spend their summer vacations. Then there were World Wars and Depressions and all the other big events that kind of put a damper on seaside frolicking, and the big hotels got boarded up, and more than one huge wooden house was turned into condos. But then, like everything else in this world, the cycle started over and city people decided Melville was this forgotten treasure, and all the old places—the pier, the beach, Ocean Boulevard, and the Arcade—were lovingly restored. You can see all of this documented in photographs that line the walls of Sweet Nothings, the candy store where Hank and I are choosing which overly sugary confection to start our day with.

“I know you like M&M's,” he says, and points to the jar of them. In an effort to recreate the Ye Olde Time feel, the walls are lined with bulbous glass jars, each one filled with bright hard candies or blue chewy dolphins or miniature chocolates dotted with rainbows sprinkles.

“Not in here,” I say. “I like them only in the package. It's not that they're different. It's just…” I take a plastic bag and scoop a few Swedish Fish into it, then move on to the sour strips, which require finesse with the tongs. “I wouldn't want to waste my penny candy on something so average as M&M's.”

Hank does a combination shrug and nod. “I get that.” He stands watching me fill my plastic polka-dotted bag while his bag remains empty.

“Don't you want something?” We're the only two people in here, and I'm sure it's not my imagination that he seems different today. Maybe he regrets telling me. Maybe some of his magic has worn off. Sort of like after I kiss someone—all that wondering disperses. I plunge the scooper into the M&M's. “Actually, I changed my mind. I will have some. Here—you want—” I pause the scooper in midair.