Vanhattan

“You’re not vulnerable with me anymore.”
I listened to the wobbly voice on the other end of the line, the garbled static of whatever bar crowd rushed behind it, and a warm feeling of frustration dropped into my gut like a stringy lump of half-melted American cheese.
What a stupid thing to say.
“Are you drunk?”
“Yes. You’re not vulnerable with me anymore.”
“I don’t have to be vulnerable with you, I’m not your girlfriend —”
“Maybe that’s not the right —”
“—don’t have to be vulnerable with anyone, actually —”
“You’re not — hmmm. You’re not… soft… anymore, with me.”
“…I don’t think I’ve ever been soft with you.”
“No, I mean, I guess —”
“I don’t think you would ever call me soft —”
“You know what I mean.”
“…No.”

There is a certain smugness that billows up in my chest when people begin to lap up the breadcrumbs I’ve decided to trail behind me. It’s kind of like what I imagine being poisoned feels like — a satisfyingly physical, whole-body experience, a rush of relief that something, anything is finally happening in a very real way. It just so happens that the anything happening is turning your insides to ash and dust and rancid slime.
Hence the American cheese simile. I can’t stand American cheese.

“Don’t you think it’s strange that you’re alone, at what sounds like a pretty lively bar, to meet someone, surrounded by people that you could chat up anytime —” his words, not mine “—and instead you call me just to talk?”
“…No. Why —”
“You don’t think that says something?”
“No. What do —”
“Really?”
“What do you think it says?”
I didn’t know how to tell him that all of my friends and my therapist thought he was in love with me without popping his fragile ego. Whenever that happened I inevitably found myself tangled up in an hour-long argument about how much I really didn’t understand anything, and how much he really understood everything, and I didn’t make this call, I took it because I felt like my breadcrumb trail had reached its end and I owed him a gingerbread house. Or something.
“Nothing,” I said. “Probably nothing.”

When I was in middle school, there was a boy who just moved to our small town, with our one junior high, and if you weren’t Catholic, that’s where you went, and he wasn’t Catholic. So that’s where he went.
He was new and quiet and small, but he had nice eyes, and was kind of soft-looking. So he was perfect fodder for bullying and nicknames. Those of us who had a bone to pick with our own awkwardness stood up brazenly to those who just seemed to need a bone to pick at all. I and my best friend took particular pleasure in telling people off for making fun of him, and made an effort to befriend him, to give him a place to feel comfortable, to broaden our ranks in this invisible war we were waging, pop punk music, neon-checkered tights, and a thick air of ‘fuck you and your cute-ass hairdo’ as our main weapons.
Anyway, we became sort of friends, and he asked me to go hang out one day.
“Sure! Sounds fun,” I lied brightly.
We walked through the cobbled streets and skipped over giant potholes in the alleyways, laughing and badmouthing the other kids in our grade. My jeans were soaking up old rainwater from the hems to my knees. It was spring, damp and wet and mushy ground everywhere. I hated mud, but I always liked blossoming trees, and thick carpets of new, dewy grass. So we wandered up to the woods on the bluff, a hill range thick with old trees and fallen, dead wood that towers over the East side of town, fluffy and green during the summer, orange and brilliant, honeycrisp red-and-gold in the fall, sopping and flowery brown after the snow.
We stepped over branches and logs, off the path, everything but us silent, the snaps and cracks beneath our feet, out-of-breath giggling and speculating about ghosts and rabid wild animals, houses disappearing in the trees behind us as he mentioned something about liking me.
“I like you, too,” I lied again, softly this time, smile tight, eyes tight, American cheese bubble in the belly. I knew what he meant, but I don’t think he knew that I was trying to turn the meaning around to save him.
I don’t think he knew, because a second later he tried to kiss me. I stepped out of the way, shallow laughs. “Let’s not….”
But then I was on my front, disoriented, lost my balance — and his hands, small and soft, were grabbing at my arms to roll me over. He managed and one snapped up to squeeze my breast.
I felt a jolt like boiling liquid somewhere deep in my gut, that made a prickly flush erupt all over my skin, and shoved. Both hands, wherever I could put them, shoved him off so hard he fell backward and rolled away and I jumped up to my feet and rubbed the mud and dirt off my elbows and stared at him.
He pulled himself up, smiling bashfully.
“Let’s just go home,” I said.
So we did.
I wished I’d punched him. For all the girls who couldn’t shove him off, I wished I’d stomped on his balls. I wished I was Buffy Summers. But I’m me, for all my attributes and faults. I’m just me.

When I was in college, I was head-over-heels, insanely enamored of one of my drama professors. He walked in the room, neat blonde hair, glasses, cuffed jeans and cardigan, very obviously gay, told us with his body to sit down and shut up, and I loved him.
I loved him for three years. Or, love, obsessed over, idolized, eh, I don’t know what any of those things mean, but I could feel him whenever he was around, I could feel shifts in his mood by the air in the school, that’s how attuned my infatuation was. I liked to pick at him and upstage him and watch him scowl and then smack me back down. I loved when he smacked me back down, and I could weave an emotional thread like steel cords to attach my existence to his. God, I loved him.
In my third year, I was in his class. I also had a boyfriend who had been in his previous classes, who was quite close to him. It was very opportunistic placement, on my part.
Our first class, I didn’t say much. Our first week I said less.
Second week, he cornered me outside the classroom.
“You have to let me in.”
I can’t. Please.
“I can’t work with you if we don’t have a give-and-take.”
No. Yes.
“Hello.”
Hello.
There was nowhere for me to go.
“…I don’t want him —” my boyfriend “— to know the issues I’m having, and you guys are close, so.”
I watched his face turn to stone. “You think I can’t keep my mouth shut?”
Ah. There was that liquid heat again, a simple, bodily heaviness, a thickness of thought and thigh as I gave in and agreed to pop a peephole into my skull.
“…No.”

My boyfriend punched me in the nose. I punched him back. Just quick jabs, no lasting damage. But he snatched up my wrists in his hands — strong hands, hands I couldn’t break away from.
The air left the room. My brain throbbed. Hooooo boy.
“Sorry.” He dropped my wrists. “Just. Don’t say I’m not masculine.” (No really, that’s what he said.)
I sighed.

The professor shoved me, once, in the midst of a heated, playful argument, and my legs hit the makeshift bed in the rehearsal space and I gracefully clattered onto my face. I turned over and saw his eyes twinkling at me, over me, behind his glasses, and my brain promptly dropped out of my head, pushed out by blood and misfiring neurons running around screaming in a blind panic. Something about breadcrumbs.

I don’t really remember what all I said to him — in truth, I said a lot I probably shouldn’t have — but my boyfriend remembered something I’d said to the professor, something I’d said in the cloak of his office, something I’d said to no one else, something soft.
The neurons cheered. The American cheese bubble clung to the walls of my stomach, thin and slimy. Poison slipped through my veins. Breadcrumbs.

“This won’t work if you have your guard up. Do you want this to work? Or do you just want me to sit down?”
Nowhere to go.
“No, sorry. I’ll — I’ll do it.”
I settled into my body, into the electric feeling of nerves sparking all through me, letting them pop like fire half-smothered, finally breathing in night air, as he slithered around me where I stood, nowhere to go.
He tapped my ankle and it buckled. My whole body buckled, waves of tears and gasping sobs like a tsunami had swelled in my lungs and crashed over. I crumpled to the floor over myself, love and pain and resentment and longing and everything in between finally let loose, in front of all my friends, as he stood over me, unmoving. I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe, I shook, I trembled, I flushed. I came down.
“Will you sit with me?” he said.
“…no.”
“I won’t bite, I promise.”
Fuck you.
“Sit with me.”
Okay.
He fixed his glasses and leaned in. “Should I tell them?” he whispered, glancing around at the class.
He knew. He knewheknewheknew. He had to know.
He didn’t know. But he’d followed my breadcrumbs, and this, here, was the gingerbread house.

When I broke up with my boyfriend, I fucked his friend.
“Tell me. C’mon, tell me.”
My throat glued itself shut the instant I was prompted to speak.
What for? Couldn’t he just tell by the suspicious lack of wet the answer? Or… was I wet? I couldn’t tell anymore. It was all vaguely unpleasant, un-Earth-shattering, un-life-changing. Why did I have to tell him anything? Honestly, the answer would just hurt his feelings.
His poor, poor feelings. So fragile and flaccid.
I forced out a moan — a squeak — and braced for impact. The sudden shift, the placated tense in his ass, the thrust.
And I closed my eyes and pretended I had to be there, that I had nowhere else to go.

“Well, if you don’t think it means anything, why bring it up?”
“I dunno, man.”
We listened to the white noise behind him.
“You’re just not as soft with me anymore.”
“…Mm.”