My pen was still moving when Mr. Griffin barked out, “Write another.”
I wrote the number 38 on the margin of the page, thought for just a split second, then wrote down, build a six-pack. I wasn’t sure where this goal had come from, I’d never been one to work out, nor was I all that into muscles. Before I could change it, Mr. Griffin said, “Another one.”
39. Take Megan to Fireman’s Carnival. We’d loved going when we were younger but hadn’t been in years. Why not go together?
We’d been at this the last half of class. It was our own fault—we shouldn’t have encouraged Mr. Griffin to push us further. All we’d done is write down goal after goal after goal. At first, I came up with all the obvious ones: get into the dorm I wanted at MIT, graduate with straight A’s this semester, etc. But it didn’t take long to run out of things I knew I wanted.
Yet, somehow, each time Mr. Griffin called for another goal, I thought of something to write, as if the goals had been sitting somewhere in my subconscious the entire time.
“Another.”
My hand was cramping up, but I wouldn’t quit. 40. Interview Monica Grey. Where had that idea come from? But as soon as I had it on paper, I knew it was something I’d wanted to do from the moment Christy told me about Monica’s antidepressants and bulimia.
“Pens down,” Mr. Griffin called. Pens hit desks with a clang. Darnell rubbed his palms, and I stretched my cramped fingers.
Mr. Griffin also had a list of goals in front of him, having kept pace with us throughout class. “The bell’s about to ring,” he said, “but it’s important to never leave a goal-making session without taking steps towards implementation.”
“You expect us to take steps on 40 goals?” Jarod asked.
“Weren’t you the one who asked me to push you?”
Jarod opened his mouth to respond, but Mr. Griffin laughed. “Don’t worry, Jarod, I’m not going to make you work on all 40. You’ll find that just putting them on paper, even if you do nothing else, will have a huge impact. Your homework will be to take steps on just one of the goals you wrote down.”
“So we can pick which one we work on?” Darnell asked.
“No, Darnell. You’re already working on many of the goals you wrote down. The point of this exercise is to bring new goals to your awareness, to discover desires hiding beneath the surface.”
“So which one do we do for homework?” Christy asked.
The bell rang. As we got to our feet, Mr. Griffin said, “I expect each of you to take concrete action on your goal by class tomorrow. You’ll each work on the one you wrote down last.”
Crap.
I picked up my phone, pulled up Christy from my list of contacts, and put the phone down. Again.
This was crazy. It wasn’t that big of a deal.
I pulled out my Identity card and read out, “I am adventurous. I am inquisitive. I am bold.” If I was all those things, then I ought to be able to make this damn call.
Christy picked up on the second ring. “Hi, Kelvin, what’s up?”
“I need your help with my homework.”
“You? Need help on homework? For which class?”
“Math. Goal number 40.”
“Oh. What did you write?”
I swallowed. “Interview Monica Grey.”
“Interview her?” Christy’s voice grew quiet. “Why?”
I exhaled louder than I wanted to. “That day I came to your house, you caught me by surprise when you told me about your friends being on antidepressants.”
“Of course, because you thought if a girl is popular, she must be happy. Right?”
“Pretty naive, I know.”
“So why interview Monica?”
I hesitated. How could I explain this?
Fortunately, Christy was quicker than me. “You still haven’t let it go, have you? You still feel like it’s all some big mistake and cheerleaders shouldn’t have any problems, don’t you?”
“I guess I do.”
“So why Monica?”
I’d never told anyone this, aside from Mr. Griffin. But if I was going to do this, I might as well go all the way and tell Christy the full truth. “My first Outcome Card, one that I never shared with any of you, was to take Monica out on a date.”
“Oh.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You’ve dropped that, right?”
“Yes. But I’m still struggling to understand everything you said about her being bulimic and on antidepressants.”
“She’d kill me if she knew I told you. You really think she’ll talk to you about it?”
“If I ask her? Not a chance.”
“Oh.” Another pause. “So that’s the help you want? Look, I totally owe you, so if you want me to ask her, I’ll do it. We just need to find the right excuse to get her to open up.”
“Think she’ll say yes?”
“If I ask her to do it as a favor to me. She owes me one.”
“Why?”
“Do you have any idea how many times I held her hair while she puked?”
“My parents totally freaked out, but it wasn’t that big of a deal,” Monica said.
I sat in a cafe, across from Monica Grey. She wore a tight red sweater with a low-cut neckline; her curls framed her long face and rolled down her shoulders. The scent of her perfume was somewhere between intoxicating and overwhelming.
“So they hospitalized you?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was so lame, because there totally wasn’t anything wrong with me. The therapists kept wanting to talk to me, like they wanted to convince me that there was something wrong with being thin. If my parents actually knew what I was getting out of the hospital, they never would’ve sent me.”
“What did you get out of it?”
“There were a bunch of girls there for anorexia or bulimia, and we’d share tips, like how not to get caught, how to cut calories without anyone noticing. Stuff like that.”
I couldn’t believe how open Monica was about her bulimia. I owed that all to Christy, who in the end told Monica that I needed an anonymous source for my sociology project on eating disorders. I was concerned that Monica would see through the excuse; after all, she had plenty of friends in my sociology course, but she expressed no curiosity about it at all.
“Did they put you on any medications?”
“Yeah, they tried me on Tofranil and Prozac before finally settling on Nardil.”
“Do they help?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
I had a sudden inspiration but hesitated before asking. Would diverging from the subject of my fictitious report raise her suspicions? I leaned in. This close, I could see a thick layer of makeup I’d never noticed from a distance. “What do you like to read?”
Monica shrugged. “Normal stuff. People, Seventeen.”
That question went OK. Would she catch on if I asked another? “And what do you do for fun?”
“Mostly hang out with friends. Movies. I love going to the mall ‘cause online you can’t really try stuff on or feel the fabrics. But in the store, you really can. And I want to make sure things fit just right, you know?”
I only went to the mall twice a year and only then because Mom dragged me. Still, I wanted to know what a day in the life of Monica Gray was like. “What time do you wake up in the morning?”
“Ugh, like 6 am.”
“Why so early?”
“That’s just how long it takes girls to get ready for school. You know, by the time I’ve showered, done my hair, and all that crap, I barely make it to homeroom on time.”
“What about breakfast?”
“I tell my parents I’ll pick up a muffin or something in the cafeteria, but I usually don’t bother.”
I was thinking about my next question when all of a sudden, Monica blurted out, “You know, you’re a really nice guy.”
Me? A nice guy?
“It’s kind of funny we haven’t spoken before, you know?”
Of course, we had spoken before. Last year, the couple of times we’d been lab partners in chemistry, I’d racked my brain to find things to talk to her about, and never evoked the slightest bit of interest from her. Now I’d hardly said a thing, just asked her questions, and she was finding me nice?
Just when I thought I was finally getting to understand girls…
That night I couldn’t fall asleep. It was one thing to hear from Christy that her crowd was messed up, but it was a whole other thing to see the prom queen up close and realize that she was merely a glass figurine – fragile as can be and pretty empty inside. It put everything I thought I knew about people into question, and my mind just raced wondering how many other things in my life weren’t what they seemed.
By 2 am I was hot in my blankets and restless. I decided to slip into the kitchen to grab my favorite late night snack. I cut up two bananas into slices and sprinkled them with cinnamon like Mom always did when I was little. Just as I was dribbling peanut butter on the bananas, Dad walked in.
“Can’t sleep either?” he said.
I shook my head.
Dad pulled two more bananas from the bunch. “Could you make me one too?”
“Sure.”
“You got a big exam or something?”
“Nah,” I said and sliced up his bananas.
“Something upsetting you?”
I shrugged.
“Want to talk about it?” He heaped a dollop of peanut butter onto his plate.
“I’m fine, Dad.”
And that’s when I noticed it. As Dad turned to leave, his head sank ever so slightly, just like mine did every time Monica Gray had blown me off. Was I doing that?
It’s funny. He was asking me the kinds of questions that led Monica to believe I was a nice guy. I looked up at Dad and studied him as if for the first time. Yeah, his hair was all over the place, and his glasses were super thick, but he really cared about me. And I was too busy chasing after the People-Magazine-reading crew to notice.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, “Want to play chess?” He and I used to play all the time when I was a kid, but sometime during middle school I stopped.
Dad’s face lit up like a kid walking into Disney World. “Yeah?”
My chest ached when I realized I’d given up chess because it wasn’t “cool.” Funny thing was, no one liked me any more for my lack of chess, but I lost time with one of the only people who liked me no matter what. “Yeah.”
Some ten bananas and a dozen games later, I still hadn’t gotten a leg up on him. But I didn’t care.
The sky glowed that indigo hue it always does before sunrise.
“Lemme show you something.” Dad grabbed a blanket off his easy chair.
We quietly climbed the stairs to the attic and up the ladder to the roof. We sat down and leaned against the chimney, the blanket wrapped around us to break the early morning chill, and watched the sunrise.
“When we first got this house, Mom and I would come up here to watch the sunrise all the time,” Dad said.
Somehow I just couldn’t picture my parents young and watching sunrises together. “Mom told me how you met at the museum…”
“Oh, yeah,” Dad grinned. “She was something. I never thought I’d have a chance at a girl like her.”
“How come?”
“She was so beautiful and always dressed just right. Look at me, I can’t even button my shirts correctly. What chance did I have?”
“So what happened?”
“I wish I knew. If I could duplicate the formula for men attracting women out of their league, I’d make a fortune.” Dad laughed. “Mostly, I followed her around like a puppy and hung on her every word.”
Dad might not know his secret formula, but combining his version with Mom’s, I roughly pieced it together. Dad had been present and attentive, he’d listened and cared. I guess I’d done that for Monica yesterday. Maybe that’s why she thought I was a really nice guy. “And you liked what you heard?” I asked.
“Your mother’s passion for art is contagious. She didn’t just know the name of every painter at the museum, she knew their whole life stories, had studied their techniques, had visited many of their studios.” Dad gazed far into the distance as the sun peeked over the horizon. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a paintbrush if my life depended on it, but listening to her talk about art, I became a lover of the craft.”
That wasn’t my experience with Monica at all. The more I heard her speak, the less beautiful she became.
“No one knows this,” Dad said, “but I even keep one of Mom’s prints in my wallet.” Dad had a secret, and he was sharing it with me? “I like to keep her with me everywhere I go.”
We sat in silence, basking in the sun’s pink-orange glow as it lit up the sky.
“I have to get ready for school,” I said, “But, Dad?”
“Yes, Kelvin?”
“Thanks for bringing me up here. It’s stunning.”
