The Upside of Unrequited

5

THINGS FEEL MORE MANAGEABLE IN the morning. I don’t know if it’s the sunshine or the Zoloft or just the fact that I’m working today, but I feel completely energized. I’m even a little amped up.

As soon as I get to Bissel, Deborah starts me off setting a tableau of baskets and things around a raw cedar coffee table. Here’s a fact about me: I’m excellent at arranging vintage stuff into rustic, artful displays. Abby calls me a Pinterest Queen, which is a compliment. I think. I guess it’s my one skill set.

The storage room door nudges open, and Reid slips through, carrying a cardboard box. He sets it down on the counter and talks to Ari for a minute.

And then he looks up at me and smiles and walks over. “Hey, Molly.”

“Oh hey! I was wondering where you were.”

God, I don’t know why I do this. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m amazing at shutting up, but every so often, it’s like I lose my filter. And it comes without warning.

I was wondering where you were. Way to sound like a happy little stalker on your second day of work, Molly. But Reid just smiles again and picks up a basket. “What are you working on?”

“Oh, Deborah wanted me to update this display.”

“Cool.”

He ruffles his own hair, which is a pretty cute thing for a boy to do. And then he stands there for a minute, like he doesn’t know what to say.

Poor, awkward Middle Earth Reid.

Though he’s wearing what appears to be a Game of Thrones T-shirt today. So, I guess he’s House Lannister Reid now.

The silence is a little painful. It’s funny, because you always think the hard part is meeting someone the first time. It’s not. It’s the second time, because you’ve already used up all the obvious topics of conversation. And even if you haven’t, it’s strange and heavy-handed to introduce random conversational topics at this stage in the game. Hi, Reid. Let’s converse about topics. HOW MANY SIBLINGS DO YOU HAVE? WHAT BOOKS DO YOU LIKE?

I mean, I could probably answer the book one.

“So, what’s your favorite thing for sale here?” I blurt.

Excellent conversational topic, Molly.

“Oh, I’ll show you,” Reid says. He starts walking toward the stationery corner, peeking over his shoulder to see if I’m following. So I follow. He goes straight for the greeting cards, and pulls one off the display.

A greeting card. This store is essentially Anthropologie’s cooler, hotter big sister, and Reid’s most cherished item is a greeting card.

He hands it to me, and I hold it gently in both hands. And I have to admit: this is a pretty fancy greeting card. It’s on heavy card stock, intricately painted with a portrait of—I’m almost positive—Queen Elizabeth I. She’s wearing this outfit with epic puffed sleeves and a collar that basically looks like the sun, and she has the world’s greatest Don’t Fuck With Me expression on her face. Underneath the portrait, in old-fashioned script, is the quote “I observe and remain silent.” I read it aloud.

“That’s Elizabeth the First,” Reid says.

“Oh, I thought so.” I look up at him. “That’s a quote from her?”

He nods seriously. “As far as I know.”

“That’s a really ominous card to send someone.”

“What?” He laughs.

“It’s like, I’m watching your every move, and I choose not to say anything . . . yet. Look at her expression.” I hold up the card.

“Noooooo!” The faintest dimple appears in his cheek. “No. Don’t ruin Elizabeth for me. She is perfect.”

“Is she, Reid? Is she really?” I flash him the Molly Face. Everlasting skepticism.

“Yes. She is. She is perfect.”

Now he’s looking at me, and I have to admit: his eyes are a cool shade of hazel. I don’t know if his glasses kept me from noticing before. But now I’m noticing.

“Okay,” I say, because I need to say something. “So, is this like a romantic thing, or . . . ?”

His head whips toward me. “What?”

I hold up the card. “You and Elizabeth?”

“Very funny.” He plucks it out of my hand, smiling.

“So, that’s a yes?”

It’s the strangest thing. I am not like this. I mean, I am around my family, but not around boys. I’ve never really joked around with a boy like this before. Not where I was the one making the jokes. I think I like it.

“We should look busy,” Reid says suddenly, glancing over his shoulder. I follow his gaze, catching Deborah’s eye.

She smiles and waves, and I feel my cheeks go warm.

Crap. Yeah. Job. Work.

“We can rearrange stuff in the baby section again,” Reid says.

“Okay.”

“It’s kind of like . . .” He lowers his voice, glancing briefly at Deborah again. “There’s not always a lot to do here? I guess it depends on the day.”

“Ah.”

I fall into step beside him, walking toward the baby section—which is essentially Pinterest come to life. The ceiling is draped with softly patterned pastel bunting, and there are hanging hot air balloon decorations (not for sale) and impossibly soft stuffed animals (for sale) and everything is organic.

Reid turns to me suddenly. “You’re not going to quit though, right?”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“About there not being a lot of work to do here?”

He bites his lip.

“I love not doing work,” I assure him. And it’s true. Not doing much work is my favorite thing. And my other favorite things include: being around a lot of mason jars, rearranging table displays, and teasing geeky boys about their fondness for historical queens.

“Well, good.”

I smile.

“Otherwise, I was going to have to bribe you with Mini Eggs,” he adds.

“Wait, really?”

“Absolutely. Too late, though. That’s a shame.”

I give him a glare, and his dimple flickers, and hey. Looks like House Lannister Reid knows about jokes, after all.

Here’s the funny part: all the way home, I replay this conversation with Reid in my head. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I arrive at my own doorstep.

Admittedly, this is the kind of thing a person might do while establishing her twenty-seventh crush. Hypothetically speaking.

But Reid isn’t a crush. I don’t know how to explain it, but a crush is a very particular thing for me. Like crush number eight: Sean of the Eyelashes. It was the second-to-last night of camp, the summer after eighth grade, and it was raining, so we were all watching Wet Hot American Summer in the Lodge. By coincidence (or fate. It felt like fate), Sean was sitting next to me. I found him massively cute: kind of short, with spiky dark hair and bright-blue eyes. And the eyelashes. At least 75 percent of Sean’s body weight was eyelashes. He was sitting in one of those folding nylon camp chairs, and at one point, he leaned toward me out of nowhere to say, “This movie rules.”

I agreed with this statement. And at the time, that felt cosmically significant.

I could barely catch my breath for the rest of the movie, and my heartbeat was probably making those giant zigzags. Literally all my mental energy was devoted to trying to come up with something clever and nonchalant to say to this boy—this perfect boy, whom I’d noticed around camp for weeks, who was now miraculously sitting beside me, and who had—even more miraculously—spoken to me first. But I was suddenly frozen and electrically self-conscious. My thighs felt enormous, and I was acutely aware of the waistband of my shorts digging into the fat on my stomach. It occurred to me that Sean—of course I already knew his name—wouldn’t be talking to me if he knew about the shorts and the fat and the waistband.

So, I just stared at the movie screen, not really watching it.

But when the movie was over, Sean nudged me and said, “That was really cool, right?” I smiled and nodded really fast.

I never talked to him again. I haven’t even thought about him in years. But as I climb the stairs to my bedroom, his face is vividly clear to me. And the mental image of him still makes my heart race.

Molly Peskin-Suso: crushing on the memory of eighth-grade boys. Am I the biggest creeper in the universe? (Check yes or hell yes.)

I sink onto my bed. So, there was Sean. And Julian Portillo, my friend Elena’s older brother. Crush number eleven: Julian of the Experimental Breakfasts. That’s the main thing I remember: the way he used to make these very complicated gourmet breakfasts for us in the mornings after our sleepovers. I guess I found that really charming for some reason. Even though I’m not a person who experiments with breakfast.

Anyway, Julian was a senior when Elena and I were freshmen, and their parents were from El Salvador, and they both had giant dimples in both cheeks. Julian had a really loud laugh, too. I kept a diary back then, and I took note of every single time he spoke to me, which was rare. Mostly because I lost the ability to speak when he was around, and I guess cute senior boys don’t like speaking to walls of awkward freshman silence. Anyway, Julian ended up at Georgetown, and Elena got a scholarship to private school, and neither of them is on Facebook, so I have no idea what they’re up to now. Not a clue.

But the point is, I can’t talk to guys I like. Not really. My body completely betrays me. And it’s a little different with every guy, so it’s kind of hard to generalize—but if I had to describe the feeling of a crush, I’d say this: you just finished running a mile, and you have to throw up, and you’re starving, but no food seems appealing, and your brain becomes fog, and you also have to pee. It’s this close to intolerable. But I like it.

More than like it. I crave it.

Because there’s nausea and fog, but there’s also this: an unshakable feeling that something wonderful is about to happen. That’s the part I can’t explain. No matter how unlikely, I always have a secret shred of hope. And as feelings go, that’s a pretty addictive one.