Illustration by Kaavya Gnanam
I don’t remember agreeing to split the gas.
Usually I don’t split the gas. I just pay for everyone’s snacks at the pit stop deli. After calculating the right amount to Venmo, we went inside. Rhea got an egg and cheese. Laura got a Lunchable. Geo got fruit snacks and orange juice. Ayo followed Geo around the store and picked up and put down everything that Geo had picked up and put down. Ayo had decided early on in their friendship that Geo was generally better at most things than him. He was good at throwing a baseball, always got his shoes tied tight enough on the first try, and never ate his food so quickly that he gave himself a belly ache and had to lie down right after. I think Ayo looks up to Geo in a way that I’ve never looked up to anyone before. Ayo’s golf ball eyes, when aimed at Geo, get so big I’m afraid they’ll fly out of his skull from the pressure. I watch their dynamic so closely so often these days that I can’t tell which one of them I’m in love with or if I want them to be with each other. I was putting my Diet Coke and dark chocolate on the counter when Ayo finally got Geo’s approval on a neon green lighter and placed it beside the can with two twenty-dollar bills.
I don’t remember where we’re going either.
But I don’t want to be weird about it. Sometimes I think too much to pay attention to what’s going on or where I am or where I’m going. It’s bad on the subway. I always get lost. I never learned how to drive because a squirrel will run by and I’ll crash my car trying to see if that’s a little acorn they’ve got in their little hands. I get fixated on things. Like how on the way to the car, Rhea peels the cheese off her egg and eats it separately. It’s a good thing I’m not driving now. It’s Laura’s turn to drive so she sits in the front seat. Every time she makes a turn she dips her head very close to the steering wheel to sniff if her fingers still smell like salami.
By fifth sniff I think I have nearly worked up the courage to ask them where we’re going. But I ask too quietly so no one hears and I have to give myself a moment to recover from the unease of this first failed attempt before trying again. I don’t know this group very well, but here I am packed with three people in the back of a four-person car. I met Rhea first and know her best. Sometimes we play basketball together in the park and when the sun pushes light through the branches of the injured trees, making a disco ball of the metal basketball net, and scattering bits of yellow onto her face while she bends down to talk to me, I wonder if I am in love with her too. But it’s probably because she is too tall to get a proper look at me most of the time. I prefer it that way. She couldn’t look at me at the four parties we have spotted each other at either. That’s when she invited me to come on this trip, in the middle of the last round of playing Rage Cage. She said it through large, painful gulps out of the bitch cup, “Dude! You gotta- you need- you need- come on a trip- end the summer with us this weekend!” I guess I never even asked where we were going in the first place.
I am opening my mouth and closing it for a third time now, sound never seems to escape, I think it keeps getting stuck behind my teeth. I’m running my tongue over the space my jaw would have occupied if I didn’t have an underbite. I put a hand over my mouth to hide how strange this may look. At this point, Ayo and Lauren are screaming over the radio and Rhea has her phone between her thumb and index finger, sticking it precariously out the window to take a picture of a small, charming house on an apple orchard. Geo straightens himself suddenly and hits his knee on a cupholder. Confused from a collision of excitement and hurt, he shouts like a groan, “We’re here!”
We call rooms first, running through the doors, up and down staircases. The entire house is apple themed. Apple tablecloth, portraits of apples, an all-apple recipe book. There is a bottle of wine on the table when we enter and in an hour there isn’t. It tastes strange, earthy, citrusy, with chewy bits. Closer to a mixture of kombucha and herbal tea than any wine I’ve ever had. I look at the others. They smile at each other in excitement and chug their glasses. Rhea nods and I follow suit.
In another hour we are sitting by the pond in the backyard. I can’t see any fish in it, but we hear frogs. We call out to them and to the sex-starved singing bugs chirping from every direction. Ayo is funnier than I expect him to be. We are both laying in the grass giggling at the clouds racing in the wind.
“Do you think if I try to make their sound that they would think I was one of them?” Ayo babbles when he’s drunk, his voice is sing-songy, each word stumbling onto the other like a toddler’s first steps. He puffs up his cheeks and attempts to croak. It’s pretty good. I smile and nod.
“Wait, wait. I can do better, let me try again.”
Ayo croaks again and it is better. I think it’s so good that it makes all the frogs stop sounding. But then so do the bugs. The wind stills. And the sun blinks, like a light bulb, twice before it flickers out.
I woke up in the room I called dibs on when we walked in, but the furniture was rearranged, disheveled. The room is a child’s room, blue, with green army men lined up like chess pieces on the desk and broken parts from a play kitchen on the carpet. A La-Z-Boy chair faces the bed I’m lying on. In the chair is a woman. She smiles gently, her legs are crossed and her arms are folded. Her hair is short, faded at the sides where it is graying. There are soft wrinkles at the corner of her mouth, smile lines. She wears a button-down with boats on it.
“Hi, Giza. How are you?”
I’ve never met her. But maybe I forgot. I tend to forget faces. I’m always looking around. There’s a mirror behind her. Seeing myself in it makes me want to turn my head back to face her.
“I’m good.”
I’d hate to be impolite.
“That’s good to hear,” she reaches into the tote bag at her feet, pulls out a brown notebook, “I’d like to hear more, though.”
I sit upright from the bed and her eyebrows raise as she watches me, curious and amused. Her ears and nose are tinged red like she’s been out in the cold. She waits patiently for me to begin speaking. The kindness of her gaze makes me feel bad about keeping her waiting any longer.
“Long trip up here and all,” I speak to her so casually I surprise myself.
She nods. Urges me to go on.
“I’m really exhausted,” and I realize I am.
“Exhausted physically or mentally or emotionally?” her voice trails off at the end.
“Uh, all I guess.”
“Hm,” she writes something down, “what do you normally do when you’re overwhelmed?”
“I don’t know. I mean- I guess, I... I try to make feelings- bad feelings like that- real. I try to make them into a thing you know. Into art and music... other stuff... all of it, makes them into an object. Something I can hold in my hand. Something I can get rid of- trash- or if I make it clean enough or pretty enough, something to give someone else or share... I guess.”
I look up. I hadn’t realized I’d been looking down. She nods.
“Does it make you feel better? Sharing?”
“No,” I frown, “It depends, I think.”
She reaches into her bag and pulls out a mask. It’s one of those flat-printed ones made of the same material as party hats. I can tell what photo was used. It’s of my girlfriend’s face, a picture I took of her a few weeks ago. It is horrific, but the familiarity of her brings me comfort.
“How about her?” the woman asks, Miya’s face flapping up and down with every movement of her mouth.
“What?”
“Does it make you feel better sharing with her?”
I bite my bottom lip. My shoulders drop after being held up by tension for as long as it took me to remember to tell myself to drop my shoulders.
“About most things,” I say.
“On a scale of 1-10? 10 being everything.”
“7.”
She nods, pulls out another mask.
My sister. Picture is from her med school graduation.
“6.”
Next, my boss. From a photo I took with him two years ago.
“8.”
My dad.
“1.”
My mom.
Maybe I’ve just become conscious of it, but my leg is bouncing so quickly I wrap my hand around my ankle to stop it.
“Why are you crying?”
I’m barely crying, but she pulls a box of tissues out from the bag, but to get these she has to pick up the whole bag and dig her hand through all its contents. While pulling out the box, a few more masks fall out along with a glue stick and a hairbrush. One of the masks is of my dead dog and I laugh. Snot bubbles out of my right nostril.
“Do you want to tell me what you’re feeling?”
I shrug.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
She pulls her tote bag open completely and turns it upside down so the contents spill all over the floor. There are only a few of the masks among them. I don’t know where the others could have gone. She picks up two handfuls of chocolate pressed into the shape of communion wafers.
“Have one.”
“Stop.”
I don’t like food being thrown in my face. For some reason. I expect her to know this.
“Hey,” she rubs at the baby hairs along the left side of her head, “I get it. This is a lot to be facing all at once. But if it makes you feel better to talk about things, I want you to feel that this is a space where you can be closer to a 10 than a 1.”
“Okay.”
“Do you feel that way?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have a game. For us to play. Together.”
“What?”
“Each of these chocolates. Is a feeling. I want you to have one of these right now. Because you will have each of these, eventually. And I’m not going to tell you which are which. Because you won’t get to choose which you have when you have to have it.”
She puts one in my hand. It melts when it hits my skin, my hands are still wet from wiping at my eyes.
“The anticipation is always the worst part of the process, isn’t it? Not knowing what’ll happen after you eat it,” she says.
She looks at me while I run my front teeth against the surface of the chocolate.
“All at once. It has to be all at once,” she gestures in example, choosing to mime and dropping the whole chocolate straight down her throat.
“Okay.”
When the first one began to melt on my tongue, I threw up immediately.
She frowns and I feel so guilty. I apologize.
“I’m sorry.”
“You can wake up now.”
I wake up in the field, empty with all the trees gone. The clothing I am wearing is pressed pristinely to my shivering body. I can’t remember ironing these clothes, usually everything I own is to some degree wrinkly. Goosebumps peck through my skin. The standing hairs on my arms give me the silhouette of a porcupine. Blades of grass bite at my back.
“Whoa there, rockstar,” Lauren’s face bobs into my field of vision, looming over me. Her hair is long enough to tickle my nose. I sneeze.
“Have they kicked in yet?” Geo grins.
I lift myself off the ground.
“Wait, did you shit yourself?” Ayo’s eyes are sad with compassion.
Alarmed, I press my hands at my back pockets. The sticky brown squish is coming from inside them. I pull out what remains of the squished chocolates.
“I fell asleep?” I ask.
“You were so gone.”
Tasnia whose last name is Tahsa but she goes by Tasha is a class of 2022, CC, Psych Major and MESAAS concentrator who has devoted her brain to understanding feelings, no matter what it takes. Any pronouns.