Forgiveness and Permission

Thursday morning is a bit like getting hit in the face with a bucket of iced fish.

First, it stings like a bitch. You swear like a sailor as your head rings, and there’s that sudden heat of blood rushing through your body to the point of impact. Your senses return to you in pained pulses of the heart. And then, just as you think the soothing cold of the ice is going to help stem the swelling, you’re keeling over from the overwhelming stench of your mistakes.

And worse yet, for the first time in perhaps all of human history, Ricardo was undeniably right about something. A fact I had plenty of time to consider for the extra three hours I stayed up, unable to fall asleep.

Hour one still had this optimistic ignorance to it as I ran through the events of that night on loop. It was magical, and gut-wrenching, and confusing all in the same breath. Hour two was pure suffering, as the anxious agony of a potential all-nighter tormented by my demons was just as bad if not worse than the potent cocktail of regret and denial that followed. Regret over turning Raisa down, and denial over the fact that it was Anne-Marie’s fault. Or rather, it was mine, as Hour Three’s delirium so neatly elucidated. It was my fault for being so thick in the head that someone else had to realize it for me.

For god’s sake, my heart skips a beat as I hear the ding of her daily morning meme. I set about cracking my neck, then my fingers, and then the code to the secret conversation starter hidden within her message.

The image macro has a relatively simple cipher. Obviously, the fried jpeg squirrel making the wildly lewd, gape-mouthed stare into the camera is meant to be the viewer relating to the image. The text below, reading, “You drank the hand sanitizer? Without me?!” is evidently alluding towards a communal kind of shock humor that’s meant to evoke a call and response. I see, I see. I briefly ponder using my dad’s drinking habit for social brownie points—maybe the pity’ll start a party. And then I notice her accompanying text, which throws all my theories out the window:.

“You when we’re on a desert island and I have to eat my toes to survive.”

At a junction like this, a man has two options if he wants to make it out alive. He can either take the coward's way out, and laugh his way into a topic change. Or he can embrace his degeneracy with both hands and hope that the confidence of honesty can tide him through the darkest storm. My finger hovers over the send button for a "lmao".

Then Raisa's voice echoes in my head like a dead loved one in an anime:

Don’t waste those feelings of yours.

This might sound incredibly dumb, but my chest swells with a kind of lofty determination that I've never felt before.

"That's a waste. They're too bony to have much nutritional value, anyways."

She angry reacts. "What happened to 'nice pedicure', ya weirdo?"

"You’re rather prideful for someone who’d stoop to using the slur, 'weirdo'."

“My bad. Would you prefer toe-totaler, then?”

“Nice prohibition-era meme, Andrew Solestead.”

“Yeah, you’d definitely be a boot-legger.”

“That’s not even a pun.”

“When did we start making puns?”

Around the same time that your laugh started to make my head spin.

My fingers pause over the keyboard as I struggle with my intrusive thoughts. I could easily imagine myself going on like this until the bus came, the kind of back and forth that makes time fly and existential dread evaporate. But then, the moment that I’d get to school, it’d be like I never existed. I have to be assertive. If there’s even a chance, I need to know.

“Sorry, I thought you were supposed to be the funny one in the old married couple.”

It’s a devious trap. A joke that’s only half a joke, and entirely a veiled confession. If she reacts to just the funny dig, she accepts the premise. If she acknowledges the premise and riffs off of it, that’s even better. But if she rejects it outright, the same way she reacted to the notion of Brian being her boyfriend, then…

“Sorry, Goggles, but I’m planning on taking the kids in the divorce.”

Two things hit me. First, a neck-jab of deja-vu. Then, an uppercut of a “yes and”. In the time I’d spent overthinking how she’d reply, Anne-Marie concocted the perfect, bulletproof rebuttal. It acknowledges the joke, adds onto it, and muddies the water by wrapping a potential, preemptive rejection within the protective shield of humor. And all in the same breath.

Fuck, she’s good.

And that’s exactly why I can’t let her get away with it.

“Really makes you think,” I type, “Why you’d let yourself marry a schmuck like me to begin with.”

The ball’s in her court. There’s ten seconds on the clock, and just about as many until the bus comes. Whatever she says next might make or break this whole operation.

“Daddy issues.”

By the time I finish choking on my own tongue, the bus has already trundled up in front of my house. I go from butt-naked to shevelled enough to bum coins on the streetside in five seconds flat. And as I’m submerged in a rattling rat cage of gossip and hormonal sweat, all I can come up in response is:

“Touche.”

The bus pulls away from the safety of my private cry-cave, and all I can do is curse the fact that I didn’t try and work in a half-brained treatise on, “Mommy Issues”. But the battle is over, though the war rages on. My desperate campaign placed me right back where I started, without any intel that would change the tide of smoke and fire. I’ve officially tried everything.

Except for the unthinkable.

I hide in plain sight for the entire first half of the day, kicking the can down the road until lunch rolls around. But as I enter the cafeteria, it becomes painfully clear that something unusual is going on.

For one, it’s markedly quieter. Kids speak in hushed tones, a good number of them looking pallid and wearing masks. The next most obvious thing is how much fewer people there are in general. Usually, the lunch line would take a good ten minutes before I was served my daily slop, but it only takes three. And the usual throngs have thinned out so much that I can see clearly from one side of the cafeteria to the other—something that hasn’t happened since the first day of covid. Strangest of all, though, I take a seat at my usual table, the one with the brown stain that looks sort of like a demented eagle, and find it almost entirely barren.

Aside from me, there’s only the two flutists—aka the flutwins—from the school orchestra at the opposite end. I think to say hi for a moment. But they’re the kind of weird that used to pick each other’s noses in freshman year. In taking my seat, I catch a glimpse of a head of medium-length blonde hair dangling a continent away. She’s just as impeccable as always, and just as impossibly far away. In this barren hall, it almost feels like it’s just the two of us. I take a deep breath.

My theory is that there’s some kind of seasonal flu going on—Maybe even the fated zombie apocalypse that was promised to me as a kid. We’d fight back to back, keeping the hordes at bay with nothing but weaponized platform heels and sheer determination. But all my dreams of lastman survivalism and rooftop parkour are shattered when I hear one of the flutwins gargle their chocolate milk and whisper to the other:

“Nyehehe, so how’d your CA’s go?”

I guess that would make sense of it. Both Anne-Marie and I, and a bizarrely disproportionate amount of the popular kids, must have already gotten our high school exit assessments out of the way last year alongside our AP’s. It’s a bit tough to remember that she’s a model student when she gets along with a sewer-mouthed scoundrel like myself. And I guess I’m technically a bit of a model student too, at least compared to the pair of mealy-brained slackers absent from the lunch table.

Part of me misses their presence. The same way that someone feels when they get used to falling asleep to a very specific alpha-wave white noise Youtube channel and it gets copyright-striked to oblivion. And in the wake of the static clearing, I’m left with nothing but my thoughts and a direct line of sight to Anne-Marie. So the unthinkable surfaces in my head. But I exorcize it by whipping out my phone and texting her,

“What’cha up to?”

I see the back of her head tilt down.

“Not much. Need something?”

That’s rather- clinical…

I say, “Just checking in. Bad time?”

“All good. Just chilling.”
There’s an invisible, but painfully obvious barrier standing between the two of us. And I start to realize that there’s a chance—just the slightest possibility—that she’s just as bad at crossing it as I am.

“Not many people in today. Kind of creepy.”

“Yeah, it’s weird.”

I see her head tilt up. She starts to turn to the side, and my heart skips a beat. But then, Rescue Ranger comes in and takes a seat next to her.

I’m getting nowhere. Or maybe we’re getting nowhere. The unthinkable rears its ugly head, stirring up my mental desert like a thrashing, giant worm.

Does she, or doesn’t she? Is she, or isn’t she?

Something snaps inside me, a plastic part I was born with that I’ll never be able to grow back. And I stand up.

I shuffle off with the determination of a death row inmate on his way to the electric chair. My legs feel weak at first, as if I’m under hypnosis rather than taking charge of things for the first time in my entire life. But Raisa’s words echo in my head, and more of them pile in by the minute. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it when she asked me if I’d ever had a conversation that changed everything in a single night. Rhythmic, and oscillating less and less by the second, my footsteps draw within earshot of her table.

I know its stupid.

That it’s a gamble. That I have no guarantee that things’ll work out, and that there’s no reason I’d be owed the privilege. But as long as there’s that gossamer-thin veil that separates how we are inside and outside of these walls, we’re never going to be more than an enjoyable back and forth. Whether I crash through that veil and ruin things forever. Whether I put her on the spot in an awkward social situation. I feel a bit ashamed at how selfish I’m being. But she has her reasons, and I have mine.

Anne-Marie’s laugh rings out like a clarion call betraying the bubble of her little world.

My dad isn’t the wisest person in the world, especially considering the outrageous prenup he signed. But I’d never forgotten this one piece of advice he told me. I remember it was on that trip to Six Flags, the day the divorce was finalized. Shortly after sunset, and also after I had finally hurled on our fifth rollercoaster ride of the excursion. To this day, I have no idea what brought him to say it, as we looked out from our bench overlooking the amusement park, and everything smelled like buttered popcorn and sounded like liquid laughter.

“Sometimes, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.”

I don’t know why, because I’m still far enough away, but she glances over her shoulder.

And for the first time, our eyes meet while we’re at school.

They widen like the bright blue sky under the broad daylight of the cafeteria. Scrawled in skywriting across her irises sits a masterclass in shock and awe. I think of abandoning this whole crazy scheme right on the spot. Except that those clear, azure eyes leave no room for clouds to hide behind.

I stop in place.

Anne-Marie looks away. Then back to me, her light face tinted the slightest hint of pink. Except we’re not outside, and there’s no mistaking it for cold. Her friends haven’t noticed anything, chatting away as if no one’s fighting for their life right next door.

Her brow expands, a silent, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

I swallow a brick. And I nod to her friends.

Anne-Marie’s head recoils on her neck like the receiver of a pistol being fired.

I lower my head and raise my eyes. The universal gesture of sheepishly seeking approval.

She points to herself with a finger and inquisitively cocks her head.

I nod. And look her straight in the eyes.

In milliseconds, I accelerate to the speed of light, and the edge of totality comes into view within her shaking pupils.

Anne-Marie’s lips part, and she finally blinks. Slowly, achingly slowly, she nods. I move forward once more. She watches me, her cheeks reddening by one more shade with every one of my steps.

“Hey,” I say.

The three most popular girls in my school whip around with a dexterity only matched by a western gunslinger at dawn. They glance at me, then balk at their comrade in the hot-seat.

“S-sup, Goggles,” Anne-Marie replies, lisping like a boiling teapot.

Teddy and co fade into the background. And so do the dozens of half-empty tables no doubt gawking at us. For one moment, it’s just me and her in our invisible arena.

And the unthinkable is no longer impossible.

“So I was wondering…” I say.

Anne-Marie bites her lip and holds her breath.

“Would you like to go out with me?”