OCD Love Story Read online

  “You’ll be the first to know,” I say, even though it’s so not the point. “Sorry to drag you into this. I know you think it’s effed up.”

  “Hey, I wish things mattered to me the way they matter to you. You create the excitement, you know? Where there’s boring crap, you make meaning.” It sounds like a thought she has crafted over years of watching me obsess and, let’s face it, compulse. “And he may be hot, but getting all into some married guy is stressful, especially when there is some perfectly cute-sounding guy our own age who obviously likes you. . . . ”

  I squint until my eyes are tiny, watering slits and I think I see the numbers on the elevator go to number six. I wouldn’t bet on it or anything. But I just decide it’s true. That they live on the sixth floor. That if I count the windows from outside the building and if Lisha would just chill for a second so I could focus, I’d know for sure where they live. Or, almost for sure. She’s going on and on about people she’s read about in Cosmo or whatever who’ve had lurid affairs with married men. It’s making my heart beat even harder so I sort of slap her arm and tell her to be quiet for a second. Every inch of me is focused on the row of windows that are six above the pavement. I’m breathing hard.

  Then it’s worth it because a window lights up, right on time, on the sixth floor. I can make out a lamp with fringe on the shade and a red glow that must mean their curtains are some sheer pink or orange. Even better: I am certain the tall, skinny form next to the lamp is Austin himself.

  And then I can breathe. And then I can feel my heart slow. And then my fingers stop tingling and feel like fingers again.

  I pinch my thigh through my pants.

  There they are. Here I am.

  “I’m just saying, when guys cheat it’s for a reason, you know? So you need to know what that reason is before jumping all in. And that’s actually really easy for you, I guess, since you are privy to all his deep, dark secrets.” Lisha’s plotting it out like a romance novel or a really juicy Lifetime movie. I smile at her. It’s dark and cold and I owe her a hot chocolate and an all-night movie marathon. Lisha likes crap movies but I can put up with a few hours of teen romantic comedies to thank her for the relief I’m feeling right now.

  “There,” I say, my eyes lingering on that window for a few more perfect moments.

  “You see what you needed to see?” Lisha says.

  “I think that’s them,” I say. “The red window. The glowing one.”

  “Of course,” Lisha says. “You know how to pick them. The glowing fucking window. Of course.”

  I always laugh when Lisha swears. And she laughs too and I may be a mess but I haven’t lost everything yet.

  THE FIRST DATE ISN’T A date.

  I’ll clarify: I think it isn’t a date, so I wear jeans and my mother’s hippie necklace from the seventies and an argyle sweater I found at the Salvation Army near school.

  The Salvation Army near school is where all my preppy classmates drop off their preppy clothing. Then I pick up their leftovers and wear them on the weekends. My mom says it’s “uncouth” to wear my classmates’ discarded clothing to school. That she respects my spirit, but that I can’t take it quite that far.

  I read a blog by this real costume designer who lives in New York City. She says when she’s working on really low-budget projects, the first place she goes is the Salvation Army ’cause you never know what you’re going to find there. When I read that blog post, I freaked out, since I’ve been, like, their number one customer since I was twelve and trying to impress Jeff with my non-Gap, non-Abercrombie outfits. I guess I proved my point, but I also fell in love with the heaps of clothing, the unexpected treasures, the hours lost in that store. Not that I’m an actual costume designer yet, obviously, but let’s say you need to look like you’re really outdoorsy or like a slut or like a really conservative do-gooder for a college interview or something. That’s where the Salvation Army is genius. I can transform myself pretty accurately for about fifteen bucks.

  Besides, I look good in hand-me-downs. I know how to take a bunch of stuff that other people find ugly and make it beautiful. Or at least make it interesting.

  “Who’s the boy?” My mother asks before Beck gets there. It’s just now occurred to her to be protective.

  “Beck.”

  “And what do his parents do?”

  I giggle at that question because it’s so clearly an imitation of, like, a 1950s family that is nothing like ours. When my mom thinks she’s not being a good enough mother, she’ll break out one of those old tropes and pat herself on the back for acting like we’re a real family.

  Dr. Pat says this kind of lax parenting is what makes me feel unstable. Not that my parents caused my issues, but that they didn’t help matters much. That I’m “looking for stability” or “overcompensating for lack of control.”

  Beck Facebooked me after last Saturday’s session and said that he owed me for the ride I gave him to the gym and that we could grab some lunch before our Saturday afternoon session. We avoided eye contact during group Tuesday afternoon, but he confirmed our lunch on Facebook last night. And when he shows up, he’s in a collared shirt and a tie and pants that have been pressed within an inch of their life. It’s all just the tiniest bit too tight on him.

  “Your pants don’t fit,” I say. And then immediately realize I’m a jackass. “Neither does your shirt.” I swear, if I could stop myself from saying this stuff, I would. But if I don’t say the things that pop into my mind, then they might eat my insides out or I might get condemned to hell for dishonesty, so I can’t really take the risk.

  I know I sound like I’m really religious or a prude or just making convenient excuses for being a bitch. I swear I’m not any of those things. I only go to church when my parents make me on Christmas. I’m not a virgin. I swear (sometimes like a sailor). And I’d way rather be a bitch than a freak. I just hate the way lying dries out my mouth and makes my head swim with anxiety.

  “My parents won’t get me new stuff since they’re not into me bulking up,” Beck says, his eyes darting between me and my mom. I think he can’t decide who it’s more embarrassing to make eye contact with at this minute. “It’s, like, the lamest punishment ever.” My mother is shuddering at the whole conversation; she is not so good at the awkward moments. She’s always telling me that she was a great parent when I was little, and she’ll be great when I’m over eighteen, but that she knows she sucks at the teenage years. They make her too uncomfortable: awkward silences and ugly braces and painful skin-breaking acne.

  And my guess is this whole OCD thing isn’t making her feel any less uncomfortable around me. But she’s going to rally even if it kills her. We haven’t talked about the new diagnosis, but she has given a lot of supportive and warm smiles in my direction, so there’s that.

  “You look very nice. Beck, is it?” my mother breaks in at last. Then she goes in for a handshake. It’s clear in Beck’s face that he’s doing a mental calculation, once again, of what will be least embarrassing: refusing a handshake or doing his weird hand-squeezing thing and then running off to the bathroom to scrub his hands. Lucky for him, my mom pulls her hand back and stuffs it into the pocket of her ugly cardigan sweater like it’s no big deal. Clearly, Mom has read the OCD pamphlets and knows the deal. She shrugs. Beck shrugs back, mirroring her.

  “You kids have fun,” my mom says when none of us seems to be moving from our spots in the hallway. Beck puts on gloves before opening the door for me. I wonder if he wears them in the summer, too.

  I don’t have to mention how super-crazy-clean Beck’s car is. There is hand sanitizer in the glove compartment. He tells me about it not once, not twice, but eight times. In a row. The rest of the short car ride we spend in painful silence.

  “This place okay?” Beck says. We’re pulling up to a white tablecloth Italian joint and all I’m thinking is, God, this really is a date.

  “I think I’m underdressed,” I say. I could have said something way less polite
. I’m shaking a little from keeping in the comment about how wannabe-romantic this place is. How it’s the sort of place middle-aged divorcees would go to meet their internet dating matches. But I just keep pinching my thigh because Dr. Pat says if I can resist saying rude things for a little while then the anxiety will lower on its own. It’s worth a try.

  My attempt at quiet, normal conversation doesn’t last long. Once we’re actually in the fancy joint, Beck’s so quiet I can hear every thought in my head and they’re all telling me to purge a whole bunch of words and opinions and random thoughts. Not to mention when we’re at the table I have a lot of time by myself picking at the bread and sipping at my water. Beck spends an extra-long time in the bathroom before they even take our order. We are so going to be late for group today.

  “You have a big hand-washing thing, huh?” I say. I think at the very least, we have our craziness in common. And I may not be into the whole hand-washing, tapping-fingers, meticulous-counting thing, but the basics are the same.

  “Yeah. Usually people pretend not to notice,” Beck says.

  “Oh. Right. I’m so sorry. I do that. I say all the shit you’re not supposed to say.”

  “No, no, I mean, that’s cool. I’ve never been asked.” Then he shrugs, because maybe he likes the idea of me asking him about his obsessions, but in reality he doesn’t seem to know what to do in the aftermath.

  It’s killing me: He got so dressed up for our lunch and is ordering all kinds of fancy pastas for us but otherwise he’s deeply quiet. I get preoccupied with the possibility of dirt under my nails and I wonder if anything about me would pass his cleanliness/working-out test. His fingernails are perfectly uniform in size and shape; I can smell soap and detergent coming off his skin from here. It’s that smell that isn’t a smell: fresh, cottony, soft.

  Meanwhile, I am one hundred percent sure I’m sweating, and I washed my hair last night instead of this morning, so there’s that, too. I’m so hot in my sweater I’d do anything to take it off, but what’s underneath is a pale pink-striped camisole, even more embarrassingly casual and probably getting damp from sweat now, so that’s not an option. I’m not having a good time, per se, but my heart’s jumping all over the place looking at Beck’s sad eyes and huge muscles. I want this to work. I just do.

  “You on any meds?” I ask. If he’s new to therapy and anxiety and stuff, he probably isn’t on anything yet, but the thought pops into my brain, so there you go. Beck shakes his head no. I’m not completely socially inept, so I can tell this is not what he wants to be talking about on our “date.” But he’s not saying much and my mind is itching from the inside. Talk about something else! I scream in my head.

  “My mom’s kind of into new age vegan stuff,” he says, “so she wouldn’t sign off on that.” There’s a smile inching onto his face. Like his face is telling me it’s okay to say whatever comes into my head even if his words can’t quite reflect that. He’s just sheepish enough to be safe, but even if he wasn’t I’d plow ahead anyway.

  “I’ve been on Zoloft forever. But I can see Dr. Pat’s itching to get me on even more stuff. Watch out. She’s into that. I went on Zoloft when I was fourteen. I actually don’t even know if that’s legal. And it’s amazing sometimes, but I don’t know if it works the way she wants it to.” Normally, I don’t talk about things like medication with boys I like, but Beck nods along with my words and scrunches his eyebrows and underneath all the nervousness of a first date, there’s comfort and intimacy. If we were different people, I’d like to think he’d tuck my hair behind my ear or kiss my forehead or something. The moment is that taut. I think I’m supposed to stop talking now; this is the part of the conversation where I lose people, but Beck’s waiting for me to continue. He’s not sipping water or fiddling with his napkin or even tapping the table over and over again.

  “Keep going,” he says at last. He’s not asking follow-up questions or even really having a conversation with me but I’m not sure that matters right now. “You look like you have more to say.”

  He’s right, but it doesn’t take the shock out. And that’s when I realize why I have the beginnings of feelings for him. He’s not Mr. Personality, that’s for sure. And he’s cute but not drop-dead gorgeous or anything. But as nervous as he is, he isn’t scared of me. I’m not the weirdest person he’s ever met. I’m . . . okay.

  I take an inhale and keep going, keep chatting away. I would have anyway. The thing bubbling in my throat is too much to swallow down or hide with a pinch to my thigh or a look in Beck’s eyes. My mind has thought of the most embarrassing thing I can say about Zoloft right now and if I don’t say it out loud I will fall to pieces or the world will. I fight the urge to say it for one more second but Beck’s leaning forward and I can’t risk the consequences of not saying the things that are trying to come out.

  He asked for it.

  “I get night sweats from the medication. I mean that in a really extreme way. I wake up in a fucking lake of my own sweat. Like, so bad I don’t even really compute that it’s from me until I’ve been up for a few minutes. Sometimes it happens during the day. Behind my neck. I just go wet, all over. Soaks through my shirts. So. There’s that.”

  I may be humiliated, but saying this has made the anxiety subside. The panic has been quelled. But of course the unstoppable force of anxiety is replaced immediately by the horror of what I have just said. Beck’s so red he must be running a fever just from the blush. But he’s smiling under that red, red burn of embarrassment.

  And then: so am I.

  His smile turns into a really big grin, a goofy, lopsided thing I haven’t seen yet, and it lights up the inside of me. I shake my head at myself and expel a bit of breath that seconds as a half laugh and I think I feel a tiny trail of sweat make its way down my spine. Beck runs a finger along my hand, which I’ve been resting on the table. I know touching someone’s kind of a big deal for him, ’cause before he does it he takes a huge ragged inhale and taps his finger on the table really fast. This time, I count. He does it eight times. Then he raises his other hand to the edge of the table and taps. Again, eight times. Noted.

  “Thanks,” I say. I don’t know what exactly I’m thanking him for. Listening to me? Not leaving after I’ve uttered the phrase “night sweats”? Touching me? Being here at all? Beck starts to pull his hand away. There’s something about drawing attention to the nice things people do that makes them uncomfortable.

  Then the moment’s over and that’s kind of nice too. The idea that the world doesn’t stop after you tell a cute guy about your big sweating issue.

  There’s a hush in the restaurant; it’s the kind of place that’s all about an unspoken volume control and a lack of other teenagers, even at lunchtime. There are cloth napkins and small white candles that flicker out and get immediately relit, and multiple forks and wineglasses full of ice water. The menus are all leather-bound and it is not my imagination that we are being carefully watched.

  “Your mom seems nice,” he says, and looks down at his bread plate. He does not start eating. Instead he pulls out baby wipes and cleans off his hands. I work hard to look in his eyes and not at the baby wipes or the humiliated way he’s rocking back and forth a little.

  “She is nice. Works a lot.”

  “Doing what?” The conversation is so normal I almost put a stop to it completely. I don’t do small talk. But the rest of my mind is blank from excitement and how hard I have to work to not say something about baby wipes and how they are meant to clean dirty baby butts, not hands.

  “She actually—she works in a jail. She’s a guard. Which is hilarious since my dad’s an architect and my mom’s from Minnesota and how the hell did she end up here working in a prison? But. That kind of sums up my family.” I don’t know why this information always sounds like a lie to me. My mother is pretty and feminine but approximately ten feet tall and when she’s mad her face contorts into that of a lion. “She got a black eye once.” Beck raises his eyebrow.

 
Our pasta comes and it looks delicious. I reach for a fork but Beck’s hands pause over the utensils and I notice a little tremble in his fingers.

  “Do those look, um, dirty or anything?” he says. I hadn’t thought to look at the fork or knife, but all of Beck’s focus is suddenly on them, and so I fixate too.

  “I think they’re okay . . . ,” I say. But the feeling I had at Lisha’s place when I saw her supersharp scissors boils up and my breath becomes a little less available. Not gone completely, but a little out of reach.

  I don’t think the fork and knife look dirty, but God, do they look sharp.

  For no reason at all this article I read in the newspaper a few months ago lodges itself in some corner of my mind and then stubbornly refuses to move aside. This blurb about a woman who used a steak knife to do some really horrifying damage to her husband. It was meant just to harm him, she said at the trial, but he bled to death. She wasn’t pretty, but she also didn’t have missing teeth or serial-killer eyes or anything. I’m sure if you saw her on the street you wouldn’t think twice. She had brown ringlets not unlike mine on a frizzy bad hair day. She looked petite: narrow-shouldered, almost a full foot shorter than her husband, if the picture from their wedding day was any indication.

  It doesn’t feel like such a stretch to think I could be capable of something terrible too, if someone as plain and sweet-smiled as that woman was. I stare down the knife. It definitely, definitely stares back.

  Beck’s waving over the waiter, and asking for plastic utensils, individually wrapped ones, he specifies, and before he has a chance to blush or apologize, I ask for the same. The waiter’s in a crisp white shirt and has a just-shaved face and a napkin folded neatly over his forearm. He knows how to hide judgment.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Beck says. “I mean, thank you, but you can eat with normal utensils.”

  “I actually—I’d rather plastic too. That knife . . . is it bigger than a normal one? Sharper? It looks sort of . . . intense.”