Chatterbox

A Short Story

Anna doesn’t keep a calendar. As an overbooked, almost obnoxiously middle-class high school senior, a girl soon to coagulate into college, careers, and commitments, she knows that this is malpractice. She even has calendars in her home, in her room, none of them put to use. On the corner of her desk it is still November of 2013, and her calendar of a boy band she was infatuated with then sticks out with a provocative picture of one of its members above the month’s dates. Greased and slicked-back hair, a pointy O-shaped non-smile, a primordial romantic energy that seemed like it was almost seducing her to keep track of her schedule, oh, how she could use that now.

Because now, she blanks on nonrefundable therapy sessions, angering her mother who is yet to overcome the service’s stigma. Now, she remembers lacrosse practices at the last minute in the same way she always has with math tests. Now it is entirely plausible she finds herself barreling down I-95 fifteen minutes before her irregularly scheduled orchestra rehearsals. There seems to be an easy solution that would neutralize these slippages, correct her unpunctuality, yet she is not interested. “Please Anna,” her dad begs on the days he does his work on the dining room table. “Look how easy it is.” He tilts his screen and opens his megalomaniacal calendar: twenty years of appalling intricacy on one app. “It’s so easy. It’s so easy if you just give it a try - here, do one day with me. Anna, come on, come back here, your quality of life will improve so much.”

And when it’s 6:45 on a Saturday evening and the school musical she’s playing her saxophone at starts exactly at seven, and not as she initially believed, eight, she recognizes that the problem has struck again. Running to grab her sheet music and instrument, she only slows down to a casual, normal speed when she comes across her dad as she hopes to avoid what would have been a completely merited I-told-you-so. There she plays it cool - in the car, she does not. Nor in the parking lot, where she is notified by the sound of an intrusive horn. When she makes it to the back of the stage, setting up her reed and her music stand, the musical director perhaps glares at her, but it’s difficult to tell underneath the three masks he has on. He actively has COVID; social functions of any sort were not something Anna believed one could do with that present affliction, but then again, she’s always newly surprised by what adults can and cannot do.

The musical she is currently nervous about was selected by the students: a very, very off-Broadway licensing of a modern yet deeply time-confused rendering of To Kill A Mockingbird with an LGBTQ twist between Atticus Finch and Boo Radley. So far it seems to fit the exact expectations of everyone who has seen it, regardless of what those expectations are.

Anna scans the theater seconds before the first act starts, trying to lock eyes with a familiar face and finally settling on Elena, who as she had promised last night, would be here. Her bronze-dark curls and patient facial features are also surely being eyed from the periphery of Aidan in the seat to her right. Aidan is playing a game of if I, most of the internal questions being, if I put my elbow on the armrest, would Elena - at some point during the show - do the same and they would touch? If I lean my head to the right, would she lean hers towards the left and they would touch? Anna looks at Aidan from afar, fidgety as a bug on its back, wondering her own hypothetical: if/when he and Elena inevitably date, as seemed so obvious during last night’s sleepover, would it change or hurt her Perfect Friendship with her?

They were far too tired and immobile to each drive home from Aidan’s house at 3 AM after the scarcely paid attention to horror movie had ended, so the two of them ended up sleeping, for the first time ever, on a boy’s couch overnight. Anna, who had been casual friends with Aidan for years, had never had quite this level of intimacy with him while Elena had probably been craving this level for months, and the novelty of the situation weighed on them heavily as they split the sofa in half and shared a large blanket. Deep conversation started - as it always must do among rapidly maturing teenagers - and Elena soon told Anna that she used to be really sick.

“I used to be really sick,” she had started, explaining a ninth-grade predicament previously only vaguely known to Anna that deepened in intensity as the story went on. Even without the most introductory knowledge on what encephalitis was or how it worked, she obtained a very real sense that Elena was in an incredibly precarious state three years ago.

“I almost died,” stressed Elena at the end of the story. Anna tried to think of something deep and profound to say, yet completely blanked. Aidan was playing on his phone the whole time, and with the platform now Anna’s entirely, she nervously laughed and shouldn’t have.

Now at the musical, she looks into the audience one more time at Elena’s expectant expression, her nods of syncopation as the music starts up. I wish I was there! thinks Anna. I wish I was in that hospital room, I wish I had hugged her mom and sat by that bed - maybe I would’ve made the drive with Aidan and watched him in the room all nervously not knowing what to say - and hell, I wish I had brought my instrument, opened it up from its case to see Elena’s sedated yet laughing reaction - “only you would bring your saxophone to a hospital,” she would say a few seconds before I blow into it, playing her favorite Taylor Swift song to cheer her up as Elena, embarrassed, would swat at the air in comical hysterics: her arm not getting far because of the wires pinning it to the bed, and all of the doctors crowding in the doorway trying to figure out what that sound is.

---

Intermission is called after a sleepwalking Act I - the songs so rote and robotic for Anna by now that she cannot even get excited anymore when the character playing Scout sings I Love My Dad (He Is A Lawyer) to a melody suspiciously similar to Avril Lavigne’s Complicated. But as soon as the break is called, she is accosted by an increasingly unwelcome guest from the keyboards section of the pit band. 

“Anna,” says Elif in a cryptic tone, jumping over chairs in her black dress to reach her. “It’s out now. 7:30 PM, as the email said. Will you - will you do it for me again?”

“Fine,” says Anna, taking an outstretched phone and entering Elif’s password for the website. The circular dots from hell rotate in an anticipatory fashion until the message stands on the screen loud and clear, which Anna reads out to her friend verbatim. “Due to the overwhelming quality of applicants this year, we have put you on a waitlist for -”

“No, no, NO!” Elif knocks down a music stand in frustration and it hits the floor, or more specifically, a deep indent in the floor that the tip of the same music stand has created and deepened over the last two weeks through rehearsals and performances. That’s what will happen when an academic valedictorian faces college decision week and - to everyone’s surprise around her - has faced significantly middling results. So far, Elif has been waitlisted from all 3,928 undergraduate institutions in the United States, a good few in Europe, and even one in the outer islands of Oceania, which she especially doesn’t want to talk about.

Every night of this distinctly painful musical they play in, Anna has been asked to open Elif’s college decisions, and every night - like a boring version of Groundhog Day - the result is the same. “Waitlists are good!” Anna bespoke on Monday. “It’s disappointing but you’ll get one really soon. I know you will,” - that was Wednesday. Now it is Saturday and Anna is robbed of any capacity for motivational soliloquies but not of her ability to shrug. Surely there is something important and meaningful she can dig out of the trenches for comfort, yet she does not have a shovel.

Elif goes back to her piano and plays Act II with tears in her eyes, heavy feelings in her head, yet no translation of them into actual, real words that she could cling on to.

---

“You are at an age now where a literary life begins. I do not mean in the sense that you will start reading more books, although that may be part of it. I mean it more so that you are starting to become the characters in your books. The eighteen year-old brain is very different than the fourteen year-old brain, even the sixteen year-old brain. It is now in the brain that you will start living out a story - a chronology of events connected to each other to form a larger purpose or theme - that will actually feel real. Many things are real now that were abstractions a year or two ago. You are now motivated to do drugs, drink alcohol at parties, flirt seriously with people with the eventual goal to have sex with them. You want to disobey your parents yet also love them; you want to impulsively go on road trips with your friends yet also stay in your room crying; you want to utilize your massive ambition yet also find comfort in relaxation; you want to make this year of high school last but also want college to come; you want to have a solid community of core, important people, yet make as many friends as possible; you want to punch certain people you also wouldn’t mind kissing; you want to be multiple archetypes of people around you yet know that if these personalities met each other, they wouldn’t stand each other. Most of all, and listen to this carefully, you know you are at an age of potentially understanding some of the big things in the world, yet you neither know quite what to think, nor what to say. These tensions are what make up literature, yet also now, in your precarious position in life, make up you. You are the bildungs and the world is your roman. Now take out the reading from last night and turn to page thirteen of it, where I’ve identified an important…”

“Ugh, don’t you just hate when teachers try to be all deep, you know, and it’s just, like, weird,” Anna whispered to the girl next to her, who had only perked up and paid attention when the teacher, in his heavy French accent, said the phrase have sex.

Elena had turned her head, her brown skin and soft intimations making contact with Anna: a girl she had only vaguely known, seen in the hallways and on Instagram up until that point. “Don’t get me started,” she whispered back.

That was September, the first Friday of the school year. That was when a transformative friendship began.

There are many things that Anna likes about Elena in the time since then, the time in which they have become inseparable. She likes the way that Elena seems to be friends with half of the girls in the entire world; there is not one person who is protected from a Saturday lunch with her. When the Ecuadorian exchange student came to the school, surrounded by friendly people instead of friends, her name accidentally skipped over when they announced all of the cheerleaders at the pep rally, her English still a work-in-progress, Elena befriended her on a level others didn’t. Elena laughs authentically, she struggles with others convincingly, she sits on couches with her hood up next to her girl friends at hangouts, sometimes even leaning into them, laughing heartily into their sides while clutching a pillow to her chest. The two girls make fun of their deeply French English teacher, a man who delivers lectures of professed importance yet confusing material, a man who speaks about “la beauté de l'érotique dans la littérature.” To Anna, Elena is the focal point of socialization and the world. She hates that she first really met her in the senior year of high school.

At this musical, this show which every time Anna looks towards the audience, ten more seats become empty, she is relieved to see that Elena and Aidan have stayed in their chairs. Encephalitis. That’s what Elena had three years ago. A dirty word, a dirty disease, a brain infection. What if she hadn’t recovered from it? What if there had been one less desk in Mr. Perraud’s English class, what if before the class began, the principal phoned the teacher, “Hey, we need to remove that desk cause that girl isn’t here anymore,” and then they took the desk, tilted it on its side so it would fit out the doorway, brought it out to the parking lot, put lighter fluid all over its legs, and then burned it? Principal and teacher dancing around the flames like a ritual, some bad country song playing in the air somewhere, oh, that’s what encephalitis could have done to Elena. But Anna would have stopped it somehow.

Or at the very least, she would’ve said something towards the end. Her revisionist ninth grade self - somehow more mature than her now - would’ve leaned towards the bed and put a hand on Elena’s shoulder and said some profound words. Barack Obama would have nothing on these words. Winston Churchill would’ve been in the corner on the flimsy hospital room chair taking notes. There’s so many things Anna could’ve/would’ve said: she might’ve delivered a speech on friendship, quote the Bible about mortality, quote an entire passage from War And Peace because alternate universe Anna’s got that memorized, quote a Robert Frost poem, shit, write a poem on the spot about Elena, speaking in verse, speaking at a hundred miles a minute, speaking so fast the sheets on the bed would’ve ruffled and the glass window would’ve broken at the sounds of the perfect, right words. 

But Anna hangs her head because she knows that none of it would’ve happened. She would’ve gulped and had nothing to say - only the most generic platitudes coming out. Maybe in the shower the next week she’d deliver the perfect monologue, maybe she’d have l’esprit d’escalier, but getting what she wanted out when she wanted it? Never. 

Anna knows this and looks at Elena in the audience once again, oblivious to it all, and for some inexplicable reason, a pair of tears form in Anna’s eyes. She’s not used to this; she’s not like the other girls in her grade who view crying as a commodity, a weekly or daily hobby. Rarely has she weeped, and this is not quite it either - only the first stage of something. She looks down. How many tears could fit in a saxophone?

---

The saxophone cuddling her is what a green card is to an immigrant: it gets her places. It gets her right below the stage of a camp or crap musical, it gets her in the living room of nerdy boys who called her needing a horn in their band, it places her where she’d never thought she’d be: playing gigs under a tent at an outdoor restaurant, Elena and Aidan and other friends usually watching from the audience. They talk and laugh and jump out of their seats and run around in such tempting ways, eliciting a persuasion for Anna to ditch the saxophone and be in the audience, which seems like much less pressure. She’s never in the audience for anything.

But perhaps it’s good being related to the stage. When the boys in the band she plays with called her up, nervously asking for her to join their group, she really leaned towards a no until she found her way to a yes. There was so much she didn’t do. “You don’t do anything!” her mom screamed when they were making her college application. “What’s it going to be like when your friend Elif gets in everywhere and you’re living at home?” Anna had even quit temple school at the age of nine, hating every second, shirking off a bat mitzvah that all the other girls in the class eventually had. And sure, those girls now were gossips and bores, but they were gossips and bores who knew Torah verse and did something with it.

Anna is afraid she does very little, just as she believes she knows so little. She’s only eighteen and knows nothing. But she knows the girls who post hot photoshoots of them and their friends on the beach, hiding behind depression and apathy. She knows the boys in her grade who are all trying to be one-hundred different versions of Mac Miller, purposely trying to seem disengaged in class. The teachers there, aiming to be so relatable and so Gen Z, the harried parents who berate their children about college with Elif next to her: the victim of it. She knows Aidan, has always known him, has always struggled to define what kind of friend he is across the genders. She knows Elena and her radiance that covers troubles and complexity. She knows people yet not things.

But a feeling will build up in her of great importance in her life and emotions - like she could tell a great story - yet she will have no way to put it into sentences. She will feel it when she graduates high school and when she sleepwalks through a first semester of college. And it will be so painfully present when she visits a healthy, encephalitis-free Elena at her house, back for the holiday break.

Sitting on her couch, Anna will think, pause, put a gentle hand on the cushion. “Last year and everything that happened felt important. I just don’t know what exactly it was - I can’t put it into words. Ugh, do you ever have that feeling?”

“I feel like I never know what to say,” Elena will reply, humming her favorite song.