We Are Totally Normal - Rahul Kanakia Page 0,28
know what? I’m gonna tell you a secret now, Dave. This is a real secret.
“Okay? You ready?” I said. “Sex isn’t that great. I mean it’s okay. It feels good, but is it an order of magnitude better than masturbating? Mmmmmmm . . . not really. In some ways it’s worse. No . . . what’s good is being with someone. Touching them. Looking into their eyes. Shit like that. Shit you have. I envy you, Dave. I envy you. I’ve never had that. With me it’s always been parties at the beach, alcohol, hanging over some girl, wondering whether at the end of the night you both’ll be drunk enough to—”
I coughed, then my voice got a little louder. “Dude, you are so great. You’re so honest. You’re so kind. You have exactly the thing that most girls search for inside a Pothan or a Ken and never manage to find.”
He blinked, and I thought I had him. But then he gave me a sigh and pulled away. I could feel the understanding deplete like the stamina meter in a video game.
The thing is, I knew exactly what was going through his head. He just wanted to be loved. Or not even that. Actually that’s the crazy thing—it’s hard to feel loved. What really feels good is when somebody else is willing to accept your love. He was walking around with all this love in his pockets and nobody to spend it on.
“You really like her that much?” I said. “You’re sure about her?”
He nodded.
“Okay . . . the thing is . . . normally I wouldn’t let you do something like this. The weird thing about people is that the more somebody loves us, the more we pull away from them. And doing something like this—taking her to the lake house—it’s sort of, like, it could backfire.”
For a brief moment his face scrunched up and got dark, and I got a glimpse of a harder side to Dave: the guy who’d waited in the corners, never speaking, at so many different parties.
“But, but, but hold on,” I said. “If she’s the right person, she’ll love it. And Dave . . . you don’t deserve anything less than the right person.”
“Yeah.” He gulped. “So . . . what?”
“Let’s do it. Let’s get ourselves invited to the lake house.”
“You can do that? I thought Avani wasn’t into it.”
“For you, bro, I can make it happen.”
9
“HELLO?”
Avani sounded surprised to get my call. I was at the breakfast table, perched on the edge of the seat with my back straight, as if this was a real serious business call about some real serious business, but she couldn’t see that, and I tried to project a tone that suggested I was bored and lying on a couch somewhere.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“Err . . . what’s happening right now?”
“I’m calling you.”
“But . . . why?”
“Just to see how you’re doing.”
I’d realized that if I mentioned the lake house, Avani would shut me down, so I needed an indirect approach.
“Uhh, I’m fine,” she said.
“Well, it just occurred to me,” I said, “that nobody’s seen you out in, like, three or four weeks at least.”
“In two weeks.”
“So it’s a thing. The old Avani never would’ve disappeared for two weeks.”
“Just haven’t been feeling it.”
I wanted to keep pushing her, but while I was thinking of what to say, her voice rushed into the silence, and she said, “At least when you and me were hanging out, I could look forward to that.”
Now I realized the power of silence. Instead of saying something, I made a noise in the back of my throat, and the words spilled out of her.
“It’s not as if you were that great. But you were sort of in the right ballpark. Now it’s just Pothan and Ken. And Carrie’s learning from them.”
Another noise from my throat.
“Nobody needs or wants me. Last year I was only a sophomore, and all I needed was to perform like a monkey, and it was fun, because I was so young. This year, I need to be somebody, and I’m just not.”
My silence went on for a long time. Avani had never been this honest with me before. I wanted to jump in and say, I feel exactly the same!, but I didn’t.
“You and me should’ve gotten together for real,” she said. “We’d have been a unit. Now it’s too late. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. This is all so stupid. My sister says I won’t