Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

Here is what they found, dear readers: they unleashed the rats and discovered that there was not one single correlation between the animals who understood the goal — and thus it can be assumed who also aspired for the goal, because, let’s be honest, there are few things that a rat craves more than cheese — and their rate of success compared to the rats who were left to wander the maze listlessly, dodging obstacles out of self-protection rather than out of aspiration. Rats from all three sets of groups got lost, got turned around, and quite a few ended up contained in the ultimate trap of the snapped-shut cage. Similarly, approximately one-third of the rats made their way to the Roquefort, most often by luck, and certainly, simply because they just kept moving forward. A few ran fast enough to elude the traps; a few others went slowly enough that the traps sprung before their arrival. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to any of the successes at all. Just rats running through a maze, following the walls to their next destination, their choices and instincts rendered pointless.

Dear readers, I don’t think I need to point out the metaphor here, now do I?

The cheese always stands alone.

Shawn isn’t home by 7:30, so I send Nicky out to get a pizza on the corner, and when he asks if he can duck into the deli for Skittles, I think, “What the hell, I’m not his mom,” and hand him three extra dollars. I’d tell him to pick me up a cheap bottle of wine, but I don’t want to know if he has a fake ID. At twelve in New York City, you can’t be sure.

At twelve in New York City, I was the last thing from sure. My older sister, Raina, was the confident one (she’s now a partner at Big Law with a perfect husband and four kids); my little brother, Oliver, was the creative one. (He’s now teaching yoga on an ashram in India — he evidently has a Twitter following of over 100,000 people, which I point out to Raina seems counterintuitive to a devoted yogi, but what do I know?)

But me, I was never really anything. I was William who should have been Willa. I wasn’t Nicky, all shadows, so many question marks, but I had my own shadows all the same. I wasn’t popular; I wasn’t unpopular. I wasn’t smart; I wasn’t unsmart. I was pretty enough with brown hair and big eyes but not really pretty in the way that mattered, and my breasts didn’t come in until way too late, so I didn’t lose my virginity until November of my freshman year in college. By then, I’d met Vanessa, and she told me who I should be, and so I listened. I wore Doc Martens (until they were no longer cool); I decided that Amstel was way more awesome than Zima (even if I actually secretly preferred Zima); I learned to dance to Prince and smoke a cigarette without coughing and kissed enough boys that eventually, one of them slept with me.

But at twelve? Who knew who I was. For my twelfth birthday, my mom and I flew to Disney World. I was too old for it, but she offered, and I’d never been, and besides, I never got alone time with just her, so I acted excited and clapped my hands and hugged her tightly when she suggested the trip. On our first day there, right as we were about to fly down the ramp on Splash Mountain, the ride broke. Actually broke. Broke long enough that we made the national news.

We were stuck up there on the precipice for nearly five hours — teetering, not going up, not going down — and at about hour four, the guy behind us, a newlywed from Kentucky, started screaming about suing Walt Disney. His bride kept yelling things like, “Yeah!” and “You fucking tell them!”

The quartet in the car two cars in front of us was close enough to the splash pool that they gave up and jumped, and though I saw three of them pop up from the water for air and scramble to the ledge, the fourth took longer, and I watched and watched and watched, holding my breath, wondering if this was going to be that woman’s fate: that she would jump from a broken car due to a blown fuse on Splash Mountain and land on the cement floor of the tide pool and drown. Eventually, she bounced to the surface and started screaming about a broken ankle, and another man threw himself into the water to rescue her and drag her over the side. My mom watched all of this with a certain stoicism that I’d inherited from her — part fascination with what would happen next, part uncertainty at her own fascination — and looked at me with a shrug.

“I’m sorry your birthday was the pits,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry. You couldn’t have known.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s the pits all the same.”

We finally got moving after hour five, and we were offered vouchers for a midnight buffet and another voucher for free lifetime entrances to the park. But my mom and I, we weren’t up for the adventure, so we took a taxi to the airport the next morning and came home early. My dad had seen the news report, so he just laughed and handed me a skateboard with a bow on it. As if I’d ever wanted a skateboard or as if he’d ever paid attention to what I’d wanted anyway.

“I’m not William,” I said to him. He looked at me with a cocked head and wrinkled brow, so I just sighed, then tossed the board in Oliver’s room on my way to shut my own bedroom door.

Nicky returns with a pepperoni pizza and Tropical Skittles, which sound awful but work fairly well as an appetizer if you want them to.

“It’s cool,” he says. “My mom never lets me get shit like this. She’s totally organic.”

“I should go organic,” I say. “They say you can add three years to your life.” I lick the grease off the pepperoni and stick the disc to the roof of my mouth. Organic or not, it doesn’t really matter.

“Or you could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

I nod my head in acknowledgement and wonder if he’s thinking about his dad like I’m thinking about his dad.

“Getting hit by a bus wouldn’t be that bad,” he says, dribbling a long string of melted cheese into his mouth. “I mean, in terms of ways to go. Boom. That’s it.”

“I got fired today.” The pepperoni grease oozes down my throat.

“That blows.”

“You’re the first person I’ve told. Which is sort of screwed up.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Where’s Uncle Shawn?”

My phone lights up with a text, and like a Pavlovian rat, I reach for it.

“This might be him.”

FACEBOOK ALERT

THEODORE BRACKTON HAS ADDED YOU AS A FRIEND

THEODORE BRACKTON HAS SENT YOU A MESSAGE

“Shit,” I mutter, then feel Nicky’s eyes on me. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Shoot. Shoooot.”

“I say ‘shit’ all the time.”

“You shouldn’t. Why isn’t your mom telling you that you shouldn’t say ‘shit’ all the time? Like, if you have to go to a college interview, and you say ‘shit,’ you won’t get in.”

I head to the refrigerator in search of some wine. There must be wine somewhere in the house.

“I’m a 9/11 kid. I could say, ‘Your mother is a total piece of fucking shit,’ and they’d let me into Harvard.”

I stop my excavation of the fridge abruptly and face him.

“First of all, that’s a terrible thing to say. Second of all, I doubt that’s true. Third of all, you should have some standards for yourself, even if it were true.”

“I do have standards for myself,” he says. “My teacher said I have the best imagination in my English class. That I could be a writer someday.”

“Really?”

“Why are you so surprised?”

“I’m not surprised.” I refocus on the bottom shelf of the fridge, where I find no wine but do find a beer that was likely abandoned two Super Bowls ago, but what the hell.

“I’ve never seen you drink a beer.” Nicky smiles. “I mean, you are such a white wine sort of person.”