You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [25]
“Whatever,” Ariel said.
Silver pushed himself off his desk and looked coldly at Ariel.
“Tell me your name again,” he said.
“It’s Ariel, Mr. Silver.” She seemed surprised that he didn’t remember.
“Ariel, right. You may or may not agree with Gilad but ‘whatever’ is an inappropriate response. Gilad spoke clearly and respectfully. Your dismissal of his comments only reveals your own shortcomings. Don’t do it again. Please.”
There was a long pause. Ariel’s pale face had turned red.
“If you have something intelligent to say please say it.”
She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at Silver. “O.K., O.K.” She smiled at him. “I’m sorry, you’re right.”
Lily said, “So what’s with the scribble?”
He laughed. “The scribble,” he said, looking finally away from Ariel, “is what human lives are—disorganized, meaningless, purposeless, insignificant, and without order.”
“Bummer,” Lily said.
“Maybe,” he said, and drew a grid over the chaos. “So what’s this?”
I knew.
I watched him, praying he’d call on me until he did.
“It’s what we pretend life is.”
“Meaning?”
“Oh!” Hala said. “Like, religion is the grid.”
“Go on.”
Lily looked up from her drawing, “So, all the stuff we do—eating with our forks in the left hand and our knives in the right. All that shit, that’s the grid?”
He smiled. “What else?”
“College. Jobs. Laws. Grades,” Rick said angrily to the grid.
“So, what? Those things don’t exist?”
“No, they do. They do exist,” Hala said. “It’s just that they exist because we made them exist. I mean we built the laws so that we’d have this idea that everything makes sense. We love everything in order. That’s the thing with religion, Abdul. Religion makes us feel like everything’s all organized. Like everything makes sense. Like there’s no other answer.”
“There is no other answer,” Abdul said to his notebook.
Then the bell rang and I wrote at the bottom of my first page, “Abdul says there is no other answer.”
“Good class,” Mr. Silver said leaning against his desk. “See you tomorrow. Come back angry.”
When I looked up he smiled at me.
* * *
The rest of the day I barely spoke. During my other classes I wasn’t asked to say anything other than my name.
I ate my lunch alone on the picnic bench beneath the pine tree.
Rick walked by and nodded.
When I passed Lily in the hall she smiled and said, “Hey dude.”
On the bus I sat alone.
I was unsettled. Nervous. I was in love the way you are with an actor or a guy on stage with a guitar. It’s instantaneous, a combination of jealousy and desire. Need. You want to change yourself entirely.
That day walking from the bus along the boulevard I wanted to possess him. Be him. Have him smile at me again. I wanted to be right. I wanted to go to war for him.
I would fight for him and against anyone who wouldn’t. It wasn’t complicated. In the beginning love never is.
MARIE
I thought about him all summer. The whole time we were at our house in Biarritz. I thought about him every single day. At first I was giddy but soon that ended and I just felt lonely and embarrassed. I kept replaying the night, cringing at the way I’d behaved. I spent my days at the beach lying in the sun, determined to be beautiful when I returned to school. My sister was at the house for a few weeks and I nearly told her what had happened. Ariel was in the US with her family. I didn’t miss her.
Except for when my sister was there I spent most of my time alone. Sometimes I’d have lunch with my mother. But I tried to avoid it. She’d started cutting photographs out of Vogue and leaving them on my bed. I’d come back from the beach and there they’d be just lying there. No note or anything. Just those models looking up at me. I’d throw them away and the next day there’d be more. She never said anything about it and neither did I. But when that started I tried to avoid her completely.
To be honest I’d never thought much about sex or I mean that sex had never interested me. I’d never had any real desire. It was a part of my life in the sense that it was a constant subject at school and with