The Half-Life of Planets (12 page)

But we don't go in. Instead, Hank pulls me around the back of the building, to the fire escape. “Hold this,” he says, and with one foot on the brick wall, jumps up high enough to pull down the metal ladder. “Climb up. Ladies first.” Then he gives a wry smile. “No one really uses the word
lady
, do they?”

I don't answer with anything but a laugh and an odd feeling of guilt about what could have happened with his brother. I grip my candy stash in my mouth so I can climb up. We go all the way to the top, wedging ourselves near the WPE's domed window. The ocean is right in front of us, all blue-green and shining, but far enough that we can't hear any crashing waves. What we can hear is the poor-quality narration from inside: “Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun. It is the fourth brightest object in the sky.”

Hank, crunching a piece of rock candy, turns to me. “What are the other ones?”

He can't have seen us. Surely he would ask about it. “The sun, the moon, and Venus,” I say matter-of-factly. I pick through my bag and pull out a piece of red licorice.

“Now see, red is fine. And chocolate. But black licorice…”

Hank remembers the tune from before. “…is a bitch.”

“Makes you want to ditch…”

The narration, its warbly music and sad old words, sounds again, “Gas planets do not have solid surfaces.”

I interrupt. “Their gaseous material just gets denser with depth, blah blah blah.”

The music continues. Inside, the star canvas must be shifting, and I can imagine the only three types of people who come here: old people, little kids with their parents hoping to pass the morning, teenagers pawing each other in the darkness. Hank and I are none of those things. “Mars is sometimes called the Red Planet.”

“The Red Planet.” Hank mimics the sound, his voice low and dramatic instead of monotone like it often is. “Not a bad album name.”

“Yeah—maybe you'll use that at Beachfest,” I say. I hand him a Skittle because he mentioned he likes the purple ones best.

Hank shakes his head. “No, it's not a real song. I'm thinking more like a cover of Sly & the Family Stone, but really stripped down, and acoustic. Or something. I need some time to work it out. Maybe ‘We Can Work It Out,' but it's too done. Too covered. You can't cover a covered song. Unless you're being multilayered, and that's not something I'm really great with.”

He isn't great with multilayered and that's why even if he had seen Chase pressed up against me, witnessed Chase breathing into my ear, he wouldn't have gotten the undertones.

“You'll find it,” I say. “The right song.” I pause and bite my lip. “Maybe, do you want to come to my house sometime? My parents, they have all these records—and…I don't know—I don't really listen to them. But this shirt, it's from their old boxes.…”

“Sure,” Hank nods. “Yeah.” We lean back onto the stucco wall, and the points jab my back, but I don't move because I like being here with him, away from the Snarkade, away from old kisses, away from groups to which we don't really belong—at least not yet. “So what planet are you?” I ask him, and don't really know what I'm saying. Maybe what I mean is, What guy are you, or What will I know about you—as much as I know about Venus?

“Well…not the red one,” he says. “And probably not the blue one. There's a blue one, that I know.” He looks at me, and for just one second I think this is it—my experiment is well and truly over—Hank and I are going to kiss. Right here, on the rooftop, with the ocean as our witness, and the sounds of planets nearby. But we don't. He doesn't. I don't. “I think I'm the rockin'-est planet.” Hank cracks up as he says it, and I laugh hard too. “I'm the planet no one has seen, the brightest one that's ever been. The one that can't fake the scene.” He sing-raps, and I keep laughing, the kind of laugh that keeps coming out because it's such a weird and not-true thing to say. So not true, that it's true, maybe.

Mother would probably say I'm out of sorts.
I spent the morning with Liana, which of course was nice, or better than nice. Stan was more than happy to give me the day off unexpectedly—I suppose I am a very reliable employee otherwise, and when I told him that I was going to meet a girl, there was a moment of silence before he said, “All right! Go get 'em, Tiger!”

But now I am one day further away from the Jazz-master. It appears that I may have to choose between the girl I love and the guitar I love. Not that I love Liana. I don't think. I don't really know what romantic love is. I know how I love Mother, and even Chase, and I know that the way I feel about Liana is different from that, but whether it's love or not I have no idea. Fortunately, there are enough songs about this—“Why Can't This Be Love,” “Is This Love That I'm Feeling”, and of course “Is That Love” by Squeeze, the band that always reminds me of Liana's breasts, not that they are really ever that far from my mind—that I know I'm not alone in my confusion.

In any case, I now find myself with the late afternoon and early evening to myself. Since this is normally Liana time, I don't know exactly what to do. I try to practice my song for Beachfest, but it just doesn't feel quite right. I look for an excuse to send Liana a text message, but I really don't know what to say.
I am bored and lonely
?

Fortunately, Chase comes to my rescue by staggering down the hall from his room and vomiting copiously into the toilet at four p.m.

Chase just woke up and vomited
, I send to Liana. I imagine her reading it and smiling. This makes me think about her mouth. This brings me to my masturbation dilemma.

I recognize this as an irrational fear, but I am afraid if I masturbate while thinking of Liana, she'll know instantly by looking at me. I imagine most people have a way of hiding this information, and I don't have access to that technique, and she'll see my face and think I'm creepy and run away. Which is what most girls do to me, and what Liana does to most guys. According to her.

Similarly, if I masturbate while thinking of someone else—someone, for example from Chase's rather extensive collection of pornography—I think this will feel like a betrayal; Liana will see on my face that I'm attracted to someone else, even some shiny fantasy woman with a tramp stamp from the Internet, and she'll run away. Which is what she does. According to her.

It is fair to say that there's pressure building up that I don't know how to relieve. I am hoping a nocturnal emission may solve my problem.

Not surprised. He was 'faced this a.m.
my phone tells me, and I just want to call her to say
Hey, wasn't that fun today, I can't wait to see you again
, but I am reminded of Chase's annoyance at being stalked twenty-four/seven with the cellular phone, and I decide I have to wait at least thirty minutes before I communicate with her again.

Chase emerges from the bathroom. He smells of Scope rather than vomit, but he is otherwise disheveled—his eyes are red, his cheeks are stubbly, he has a rather vicious case of bed head, and he walks with a shambling gait, like a zombie in an old movie.

“I drank way too much. I will never ever do it again,”

Chase says.

“‘Not until the next time,'” I say, completing the line from The Smiths song. Chase punches me in the arm. It hurts, but it's the kind of thing one must brush off if one has brothers. Or so I've been told.

“Shut the hell up,” he says. “Don't be a dick to me just because your hot girlfriend keeps blue-balling you.” With that he shuffles back to his room and closes the door.

I want to tell him that he's completely mischaracterized our relationship. While it's true that I have occasionally come home from hanging out with Liana with a painful ache in my testicles (one that could, a little online research revealed, be cured by masturbation, but that brings us back to the problem), it's certainly not something she is doing to me intentionally, as Chase implies. It's my problem, not hers. But I think this is a difference in how Chase and I view girls. It's clear that he views his dealings with girls as a nearly commercial exchange. He pays a certain amount of attention and text messages, and he receives sexual contact in return.

I don't understand this point of view, and I don't know which of us is the one who is normal with respect to this issue. Certainly enough girls seem to respond to Chase's “magic” that perhaps his view, odd as it seems to me, is actually the normal one.

And it does occur to me that I may be putting my nascent relationship, friendship, friendship without benefits, whatever it is that Liana and I have, at risk by not “making a move.” Again, this is something girls seem to expect. The boy is supposed to assume the risk of moving the relationship beyond the friendship stage. I don't know why this is. But I suppose now that Liana knows about my condition, my
wonderful difference
, as some of the Asperger's blogs would have it, I might be able to fall back on that as an excuse—I can't read social cues, remember; that's why I thought I could kiss you. I suppose it's not an excuse if it's true.

I guess I run the risk of her not wanting to hang out with me anymore, which would be awful and horrible. But it would be more horrible to hang out with her and have her tell me she's going out with someone else.

Fine. I will kiss her. The next time I see her, I will make a move. I do not know exactly how one does this, but I will get it done. I will make clear that I want to “take the relationship to the next level.”

I am essentially alone in the house. I am thinking about kissing my girlfriend, or the girl who is my friend. It will be tomorrow before I see her again, so hopefully I will be able to find a way to disguise the look on my face by then. After all, how can I do it correctly if I can't even imagine it correctly? I head into my room, lock the door, and emerge two minutes later feeling far more relaxed than I've felt in days.

Mother comes home only a few minutes later. This surprises me, as her shift at the post office sorting station ends at five, but she normally works at least two hours of overtime.

“Hey, buddy,” she says. “How are you?”

“I am out of sorts,” I say. “It's quite unusual for you to be home this early.”

Mother smiles. “And that's why you're out of sorts?”

“No. I am out of sorts for other reasons.”

“Glad to hear it,” she says, flopping into a chair and flipping off her shoes. “I just had to get out of there. One more trip across that floor and I think I would have gone completely insane. I mean, God knows we need the money, but at a certain point, the overtime just stops being worth it. You know?”

“No. I've never gotten any overtime, because even in the summer I don't work more than thirty-five hours a week. Stan's quite clear that he would like to give me more hours, but—”

“Okay, okay,” Mother says. “Listen, it's the beginning of my weekend, and I want a margarita. You feel like going to El Mariachi?”

“Yes I do. I enjoy the guacamole-preparation ritual.” At El Mariachi, the guacamole is prepared tableside in a stone mortar, with all the ingredients added in the same order every time. I find it very satisfying.

“I know you do,” Mother says, smiling. “But listen, no asking the band if they know any
narcocorridos
this time.”

I had been reading about a popular Mexican genre of music that chronicles the lives of drug dealers, and figuring the band at El Mariachi would be experts, I asked them about it. They grew surly, and Mother was embarrassed.

“All right.”

“In fact, no talking to the band at all,” Mother says. She goes to her room, changes her clothes, knocks on Chase's door to ask if he'd like to go to El Mariachi, and receives a string of expletives for her trouble. “Talk about out of sorts,” Mother says.

“He vomited at four o'clock,” I say. “We saw him this morning, and he was apostrophe faced.”

Mother looks at me for a long time as she collects her keys from the table. “There is so much I have to untangle from that little statement,” she says. “Get in the car.”

I obey, and Mother drives us to El Mariachi.

I explain, in this order, the fact that Chase was intoxicated in the a.m., who I meant by “we,” why I wasn't at work, and where I heard someone called apostrophe faced.

At the restaurant, we are seated by the hostess, who is Shelley from school. I had a math class with her in ninth grade. She's dressed in the El Mariachi uniform of Mexican peasant blouse and black skirt, and it is with great effort that I don't stare at her bare, tanned shoulders. If Shelley recognizes me, she gives no indication. She quickly goes from our table over to a table occupied by David Olson, lacrosse-playing star. David is dining alone, and Shelley sits at his table for a moment. It occurs to me that they might be going out. Perhaps he sits here waiting for her shift to end, subsisting on chips and salsa and whatever crumbs of conversation Shelley is able to dole out when her manager is not looking.

“Hank. You're staring,” Mother says to me, and I turn back to her. “So I have a couple more questions.”

By the time I've finished answering all of Mother's follow-up questions and have covered Liana's interest in astronomy, her dead sister, and her coffee preferences, we are into our second basket of tortilla chips, and Mother is debating whether to order more guacamole. “I feel bad,” Mother says. “I just—I don't feel like I can turn down the overtime, you know? The house needs work, and…but I'm obviously missing out on a lot. Let's have her over. Tomorrow. Can we? I mean, would that be okay with you? I'd really like to meet her.”

“It is okay with me,” I say. I whip out my phone and text
Mother invites you to dinner at our house tomorrow. RSVP.

I am happy because now I have an excuse to call Liana when we get home and also because I will get to kiss her at night, perhaps as I walk her home from my house, which seems far more suitable than some daylight kiss outside Espresso Love or on the beach in full view of dozens of students from our high schools.