I know what love is, but only theoretically. I don’t feel it the way other people do. Instead, I dissect it: Oh, my mother is putting her arms around me and telling me how proud she is of me. She is offering me her last French fry even though I know she wants it. If p then q. If she acts this way, then she must love me.
Jess spends time with me that she could otherwise spend with Mark. She doesn’t get angry with me, except for the time when I took all the clothes out of her closet in her dorm room and tried to organize them like mine. She watches CrimeBusters when we are together, although the sight of blood makes her faint.
If p then q.
Maybe I’ll tell Jess my idea today. And she will say yes to being my girlfriend and I will never have to see Mark again.
In psychoanalytic theory there is a phenomenon called transference. The therapist becomes a blank screen, onto which the patient projects some incident or feeling that began in childhood. For example, a patient who spends sessions silent might be asked by the therapist if there is a reason she doesn’t feel comfortable making free associations. Is it because she is afraid the therapist will find her comments stupid? And then, lo and behold, the patient breaks down. That’s what my father used to call me. Stupid. Suddenly, with the dam broken, the patient will begin to recall all sorts of repressed childhood memories.
My mother never called me stupid; however, it would not be a far reach for someone to look at my feelings for Jess and assume that, in the context of our relationship as tutor and pupil, I am not in love.
I’m just in transference.
“A medium gluten-free pizza,” I say to the mountainous woman at the cash register, who is Greek. If she’s Greek, why does she have an Italian restaurant?
Jess nudges me.
“Please,” I add.
“Eye contact,” Jess murmurs.
I force myself to look at the woman. She has hair growing on her upper lip. “Please,” I repeat, and I hand her the money.
She gives me back my change. “I’ll bring it over when it’s ready,” the woman says, and she turns back to the wide mouth of the oven. She sticks an enormous paddle inside, like a tongue, and pulls out a calzone.
“So how’s school going?” Jess asks.
“It’s okay.”
“Did you do your homework?”
She doesn’t mean my academic homework, which I always do. She means my social skills homework. I grimace, thinking about our last lesson. “Not quite.”
“Jacob, you promised.”
“I didn’t promise. I said I would try to strike up a conversation with someone my own age, and I did.”
“Well, that’s great!” Jess says. “What happened?”
I had been in the library at the bank of computers, and there was a kid sitting next to me. Owen is in my Advanced Placement physics class. He is really quiet and very smart, and if you ask me, he has a little bit of Asperger’s in him. It’s like gaydar; I can tell.
For fun, I had been on a search engine researching fracture pattern interpretation in the skull, and how you can differentiate between blunt-force trauma and ballistic trauma using concentric fractures, and that factoid seemed to be the perfect opening salvo for a conversation. But I remembered Jess saying that not everyone is wowed by someone who’s the human equivalent of a Snapple cap. So instead, I said this:
Me: Are you going to take the AP test in May?
Owen: I don’t know. I guess.
Me (snickering): Well, I sure hope they don’t find semen!
Owen: What the hell?
Me: An AP test-acid phosphatase test-it’s used with a forensic light source to test for presumptive semen. It’s not as conclusive as DNA, but then again, when you get a rapist who’s had a vasectomy, there won’t be any sperm, and if an AP test and a 530-nanometer trispot is all you’ve got-
Owen: Get the fuck away from me, freak.
Jess has gone all red in the face. “The good news,” she says evenly, “is that you tried to initiate a conversation. That’s a really big step. The fact that you chose to discuss semen is unfortunate, but still.”
By now we have reached the table in the back where Mark is waiting for us. He is chewing gum with his mouth wide open, and wearing that stupid orange sweatshirt. “Hey, Chief,” he says.
I shake my head and take a step backward. That sweatshirt, he wasn’t wearing it when I first saw him. I bet he put it on on purpose, because he knows I don’t like it.
“Mark,” Jess says, after glancing at me, “the sweatshirt. Take it off.”
He grins at her. “But it’s more fun when you do it, baby,” he says, and he grabs Jess and tugs her into the booth, practically onto his lap.
Let me just come out and say I don’t get the sex thing. I don’t understand why someone like Mark, who seems completely hell-bent on exchanging bodily fluids with Jess, isn’t equally excited to talk about the fact that snot, bleach, and horseradish can all give you false positives for blood during presumptive tests. And I don’t understand why neurotypical guys are obsessed with girl breasts. I think it would be an enormous pain to have those sticking out in front of you all the time.
Fortunately, Mark does take off the orange sweatshirt, and Jess folds it up and puts it on the seat where I can’t see it. It’s bad enough just knowing it’s there, frankly. “You get me mushroom?” Mark asks.
“You know Jacob isn’t a fan of mushroom…”
There is a lot I’d do for Jess, but not mushrooms. Even if they’re touching the crust on the far side of the pizza, I might have to vomit.
She pulls her cell phone out of her pocket and sets it on the table. It is pink and has my name and number programmed into it. It might be the only cell phone that has my name in it. Even my mother’s cell phone lists our number as HOME.
I stare down at the table, still thinking about Mark’s sweatshirt.
“Mark,” Jess says, sliding his hand out of the back of her shirt. “Come on. We’re in public.” Then she addresses me. “Jacob, while we’re waiting for the food, let’s practice.”
Practice waiting? I don’t really need to. I’m fairly proficient at it.
“When there’s a lull in the conversation, you can toss out a topic that gets people talking again.”
“Yeah,” Mark says. “Like: Chicken nuggets are neither chicken nor nuggets. Discuss.”
“You’re not helping,” Jess mutters. “Are you looking forward to anything this week in school, Jacob?”
Sure. Rampant dismissal and abject humiliation. In other words, the usual.
“In physics I have to explain gravity to the rest of the class,” I say. “The grade’s half on content and half on creativity, and I think I’ve found the perfect solution.”
It took me a while to think of this, and then when I did I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.
“I’m going to drop my pants,” I tell her.
Mark bursts out laughing, and for a second, I think maybe I’ve misjudged him.
“Jacob,” Jess says, “you will not drop your pants.”
“It completely explains Newton’s law-”
“I don’t care if it explains the meaning of life! Think about how inappropriate that would be. Not only would you embarrass your teacher and make him angry but you’d be teased by other students for doing it.”
“I don’t know, Jess… you know what they say about guys with long IEPs…,” Mark says.
“Well, you don’t have an IEP,” Jess answers, smiling. “So there goes that theory.”
“You know it, baby.”
I have no idea what they’re talking about.
When Jess is my girlfriend, we will eat pizza without mushrooms every Sunday. I’ll show her how to enhance the contrast of fingerprints on packing tape, and I will let her read my CrimeBusters journals. She’ll confide that she has quirks, too, like the fact that she has a tail that she keeps hidden under her jeans.