Argument Triangle

I was arguing with Careen. So normal. We were standing on my front porch. Her parents were in a truck parked on the grass in front and she and I were very nearly outright screaming at each other. In retrospect, I think it's totally bizarre that they just sat there, watching us yell. But who knows, maybe they were into it, maybe they had made bets, or maybe they had mentally broken out the popcorn?

She was trying to get me to come to Raymond with her. She had a date with Tyson that night and she thought I had a date with David that night. I was disagreeing with her. I stated repeatedly that he had not asked me for a date and even though it was not out of the ordinary for him to take me on a date (he had two days before), he liked to date lots of girls and if I was a betting girl I would have bet that he was taking Jillian out and not me.

Careen was not to be deterred and insisted that I come along. Her parents were driving to Raymond anyway and it would save the boys some gas if they didn't have to drive out to Magrath to pick me up. I, again, reminded her that David had not asked me out and she should just go meet up with her date and everything would be fine. But let's be clear, I yelled it.

Then she yelled the clincher. “But David loves you!”

This was a big part of the problem. For the past two years and change, I had gone out on random dates with David, seen him at dances, and parties. Whenever I saw him, it always felt like there was something going on between the two of us. Like there was a special connection between us, yet even though he was on the phone with me, visiting my house, dancing with me, and glancing at me with apparent interest, he was still dating other girls and not doing anything that unmistakably drew me to him. I would drop my books on my desk at school on Monday morning and ask the boy cousins and Careen what he meant by his latest interaction with me and they would all tell me he had to be in love with me. It took me forever to figure out that the reason they all said this was because they all loved me. They couldn’t even comprehend a world where I wasn’t the most desirable thing in the room. It was unthinkable that he might only be attracted to me in a passing way.

And I had to put a stop to the sympathy they gave me. Even though David flirted, even though I had memories of him from when I had been his girlfriend, for him, nothing that happened between us made me the one for him. Like I said, he was usually dating other girls and I had been dropped by him painfully more than once. I had been trying to take the situation by the horns and refuse him access to me altogether, but I have this prevalent problem. I’m curious. And if I heard his voice on the phone line, I would get very excited like I was watching a TV series and I couldn’t wait to see what would happen in the next episode. Actually, it was exactly like watching a TV series, because the next episode always left me wanting to see more without answering any of my crucial questions.

Part of putting a stop to this unfortunate cycle was that I could no longer let his interactions with me be analyzed by Careen or anyone else. I had already answered the question myself. He didn’t love me the way I wanted and he never would. Waiting around for the next part of the show was wasteful and I hated myself for doing it. The truth was he was bread-crumbing me, and I hadn’t wanted to recognize that the bread trail only led to me being deserted in the forest scrambling to find my way home.

It wasn’t Careen’s fault that any of this had happened, but I lashed out at her all the same. “If he does,” I said icily, “then his love tastes like garbage.” I hoped the language was strong enough to communicate to her that she had to stop pushing me this way. If he wanted me, he knew where to find me.

And then a sudden feeling like a glowworm crept into my head and it whispered. “You should go with her and see who he’s taking out tonight. It would be better than staying home and you couldn't do any harm by seeing. If things get uncomfortable, you can just call your dad to pick you up. You’ll probably see something you don’t want to, but it will help you to see what the real deal is with your own eyes.”

So, nothing Careen said influenced me at all and I got in the truck because I was listening to an imaginary glow worm in my head.

But let's also add a detail to this story. I expected the evening to be a disappointment, so I was wearing a Dragon Ball Z T-shirt. When we got to the house in Raymond, one of the little boys came up to me and said (utterly no joke), “I have that exact shirt.” And I should have been embarrassed, but instead, I thought it was the funniest thing. I was one of the boys!

David walked through the door and I had never seen that look on his generally happy-go-lucky face. He was livid... at me.

And we were on round two of our yelling matches for the night; David versus Careen. David was going on a date with Jillian that night, as I predicted, and having a fifth wheel on the double date he was orchestrating was not part of his plan. He was annoyed, but Careen was plucky and utterly refused to go unless I could go too. After all, she had bullied me into getting into that truck when I told her over and over that I was not invited. I didn't see it that way and I was about to interrupt their bickering to say I'd just go home and Careen didn't have a thing to worry about when suddenly a light went on in David's head.

“One sec,” he said, walking away.

He was back a minute later having solved everything like a champ. “Stephanie, my brother, Chris, will be your date.”

My thought process was a fork with two prongs. The first one went something like, Chris? That incredibly interesting boy, who doesn’t like me, who looks like an Italian supermodel with his shirt off? Hmm... I guess I can stick around for that.

The second prong on my fork was the reason I got into that truck in the first place. You see, I never would have been able to do what David had just done. I never could have sent a boy I liked in a serious way off with my sister for a date. I simply could not have done that. I’m even very sympathetic toward people who have to make tough choices that have consequences that may come off as cruel. Very sympathetic. Yet, even in my callous, heartless, cruel-girl state, I could not have done that. I couldn’t even think of a radical scenario where that would have been okay with me, and I’m very imaginative. There was only one explanation as to why he could do that.

He didn’t have feelings for me.

Not even in a half-hearted way, which is what I had always thought. He had meant to dump me and not get back together with me.

And I decided not to process it. I had already been hurt by that boy enough that I felt scarred and humiliated whenever I thought of him. Instead, it was much nicer to think of Chris, who had not hurt me, and who did not look anything like his brother in body, face, or mannerisms. He was an entirely different animal, who was, as far as I could tell, very different from every other man I had ever met. And as being in close proximity to Chris was not something I could accomplish on my own, I decided to put David cleanly out of my mind and focus on someone else I found very interesting. Like I said before, I have a problem with curiosity.

So, we drove to the movie theater. Jillian had got there ahead of us and she had bought four tickets to a sold-out show. Since I was the person who should not have been there, I looked up at the movie listing, chose a horror/suspense thing, and asked Chris if he wanted to see that with me.

He looked bored but answered that he would.

We left the others and went in ourselves. As we crossed the lobby, I had an unusual experience. Normally, when I went to the movies with a guy, he had this thought balloon over his head and it was easy to read exactly what he was thinking. The guys I went to the movies with were always thinking the same thing. They thought, “Wow, I'm here with Stephanie Quist. This is my big chance. I'm going to impress her and she'll be my girlfriend and it'll be awesome.” And I was always shaking my head thinking that that was the last thing in the world that was going to happen.

Chris was thinking nothing of the sort. He had just gotten dragged into some ridiculous teenage drama that was not his problem.

We went into the theater. It was quite full and had a lot of runoff from the sold-out teenage romantic comedy, so we sat next to a row of girls who were not about to watch the movie they had come out for.

I sat down and breathed to the uninterested young man next to me, “Thanks for coming with me. It has been the worst day.”

He said, “It's my pleasure.”

And my heart skipped a beat. My heart had never skipped a beat before. I was perfectly stunned.

I turned to him and ventured to say, “Do you mind if I talk to you? Normally, when I'm out with a guy I try not to talk when we're at the movies. I have a lot of thoughts and I don't want to overwhelm anybody, but do you mind if I talk to you?”

“You can tell me whatever you want,” Chris said.

The movie started and I said whatever popped into my head. It was like Anne riding down the Avenue with Matthew Cuthbert, as she had finally met someone who would let her talk. Except in my story, Chris was a lovely substitute for Gilbert Blythe, as in he wasn't pulling my pigtails and I wasn’t breaking a slate over his head.

Two-thirds of the way through, I had run out of things to say, because the movie had got super intense. I got this weird feeling like someone was watching me. So I turned to my left and this pretty blonde girl was looking in my direction, but she was not looking at me. She was looking at Chris over my head and unless I was mistaken, there was a metaphoric stream of drool dripping down the side of her chin. I stopped and looked at him. Was he really as handsome as all that?

He was.

The thing was he didn't look like a teenager. He looked like a grown-up man. He had a high forehead with a perfect widow's peak. His hair was dark brown and his eyes were a heady medium cocoa, deep set with a teardrop shape. He was taller than average with a light skeleton, long muscles, and a brownish skin tone. Afterward, I liked to joke that from just beneath the nose down he looked like Keanu Reeves and from that spot up he looked like David Duchovny. Meaning, he looked like a movie star.

By the time we left the movie theater, we had been talking for hours and we had to meet up with the other kids. David was driving Jillian's car, so Chris got behind the wheel of the other car and drove us to the bowling alley. I, dead serious, thought I was going to be in a car accident that night. I had driven with a lot of guys, but none of them had ever driven as recklessly as Chris. It was weird because it didn't seem like he was driving that way to impress me. He wasn't interested in me. Regardless, I remembered it as a very Barney Snaith move and Chris himself as an unusually good date.

And the night ended with round three of the figurative boxing matches. It was me versus David and we couldn’t stop yelling at each other on the way home. Interesting triangle there. Careen and I yelling at each other. Careen and David yelling at each other. David and me yelling at each other. I guess the night couldn't have ended any other way.

That was the only night where I ought to have been walked to my front door by a boy and wasn’t.

Yep, I’d lost both my fights that night.

I woke up the next morning and had the unexpected pleasure of suddenly being forced to process what I had put aside the night before. I had been brutally (though not physically) hurt by David on three occasions before this one, and I was preparing myself for dealing with this blow the same way I had dealt with the others, but I soon realized this one wasn’t as bad. I found I could notice that the sun was shining outside. I went and fetched a Sprite I had bought myself the night before and drank it, enjoying the idea that for once in my life I had paid for a pop myself instead of letting David, or some other guy, pay for it. He had bought drinks for everyone, but I had skulked off and paid for my own myself. Careen had commented that my doing that had hurt his feelings.

And suddenly, the memory of that morning is a good memory. Not that it mattered if I hurt his feelings in that way. I can’t think of anything that could possibly matter less, but I remember how the air felt around my body, how my feet felt on the lino in the kitchen, and how even though it is somewhat catastrophic to be discarded by someone you like, how I felt sort of free. Like, now that mess was sorted, I could go find someone better.