Carry the Ocean: The Roosevelt, Book 1 (7 page)

In fact, I’d long since kicked guilt over crushing on an autistic boy out the window—clearly he was ten thousand times more put together than me—and had developed some serious fantasies about making out with him. Now that I knew those fantasies could be reality, they were in overdrive.

I kept typing.
I don’t know how to fix this, and I’m afraid there’s no fix, and
— I stopped, overwhelmed, and passed his phone back, all but dropping it into his hands.

His response at first was no response. He read what I’d written, then stared at it a long time, not saying anything. Not rocking. Eventually he typed something too, and passed it over to me.

E: I will help you fix it. Let me help you clean your room.

What? Clean my—
what
? I frowned and typed back. He’d edited our conversation with a J and an E before our comments, so I put a J: before my reply.

J: Why do you want to clean my room?

He frowned at my comment and typed another quickly.

E: You said that was the problem. I want to fix the problem. It will be tricky because it’s messy and that bothers me a lot, but I can get through it. I’m strong.

J: But why would you want to clean my room?

Now he looked exasperated.
E: Your room is messy. I want to kiss you in your room, but I can’t until it’s clean. So I want to clean your room. Because I want to kiss you.

I let my breath out in a rush.

I kept staring at the words he’d typed, feeling dizzy looking at them. In my mind’s eye I saw Emmet pressing me to my bed, touching my face, my hair, kissing me. It was funny, because in my head he smiled at me in a subtle, rakish manner he never would in real life.

I realized, though, he
did
smile at me like that, in his own way.

I wanted that kiss. I wanted to do whatever I had to do in order to get it. But in the same way Emmet’s autism defined him, my depression and anxiety defined me.

J: I’m embarrassed to have you clean my room for me. I should do it myself.

Emmet made a subtle, quirky facial gesture which I’d come to learn was Emmet for raising one eyebrow.
E: But you said you did your best. I thought you meant you couldn’t do more, like it was the same as the store, that your room was being too loud. Am I wrong?

No, he wasn’t—I shook my head, too moved to type this time.

He typed more.
I don’t mind cleaning. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. I enjoy putting things in order. It makes me feel happy. It would make me happy to help you, Jeremey. Let me help you.

I felt so overwhelmed—but in a good way. I took the phone.
J: Emmet, you’re very good to me.

He smiled, his stretched, lopsided smile, which I loved. He didn’t look me in the eye, but he didn’t need to. I understood.

I typed one more time.
When you kiss me, it will be my first kiss.

It felt a little terrifying to say, but only a bit. Emmet read my note, smiled again, though not as wide.
E: My first kiss too.

Feeling bold, I typed,
J: I want my first kiss.

Now his grin was as wide as his face, and he hummed as he typed.
E: Then we’d better start cleaning.

Chapter Seven

E
mmet

H
ere’s something only Althea understands, and it’s why Jeremey’s room upset me so much. People think only humans and animals have feelings, but it’s not true. Everything does. And all the things in Jeremey’s room, the papers, the baskets, the books, the dirty clothes—they were all sad and angry, like Jeremey.

When I look at an object, I can feel what it’s feeling. All things have feelings. I have a hard time knowing what people feel, but objects are a different story. When I was little, I had a favorite pen and a favorite pair of shoes, but I felt bad because the other pens were jealous, and the other shoes were sad when I didn’t pick them. I had two pillows on my bed, and I had to rotate between them each night, or they would pout.

Althea and my mom argued a lot when I was little about whether or not this was okay. Althea said she did the same thing and she turned out fine. Mom said it was different for me, that Althea shouldn’t encourage me, and they went round and round about it. Usually Dad and I left the house to get ice cream.

Now that I’m older, I don’t worry about the chair I’m not sitting in being jealous. That’s crazy, trying to make everything happy. They could have explained that instead of arguing whether or not knowing everything has feelings is okay. But picking up my room is a way to take care of my things. My room is never messy. As soon as I get out of my bed, I make it, even to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. When I’m done at my computer, I line up the keyboard and the trackpad. Everything is in its place. It makes everything easier, makes the things in my life happier. Makes
me
happier.

A clean room would make things easier for Jeremey, but it made sense that cleaning was a challenge for him, because sometimes everything is difficult for Jeremey. I had to tell my mom to stop offering him choices for refreshments when he came to our house. He always worries he’s choosing the wrong thing. Noises are bad too. It doesn’t take much to overwhelm him.

Jeremey’s room had to overwhelm him simply looking at it. I stood in the middle of his rug, trying to decide where to start. He sat on the edge of his bed, shoulders hunched.

The bed. I decided that would be a good beginning.

He helped me straighten the bedding, though I showed him how to make it perfectly, the sheets iron-straight, the pillows laid out just right. He had a headboard with shelves, which I thought was a bad idea since it made it too easy to be messy, but I didn’t want him to feel self-conscious again, so I simply straightened it.

He had a lot of garbage in the room, things he needed to throw away but couldn’t. Jeremey
did
understand about things having feelings, but they overwhelmed him. We made piles of things to save, and things to throw away, and things to put away. I told him what nobody ever told me, that you couldn’t make all the things happy and could only do your best. That sometimes we have to say goodbye to things and miss them instead of enjoy them. I noticed the longer we worked, the more things he put in the throwaway pile, moving them sometimes from the saved pile. The more he put in that pile, the more he relaxed.

“This is so good,” he kept saying. “It’s so easy with you helping. How do you do it? Why can’t I do this too?”

I couldn’t answer that. It was complicated, plus I wanted to keep working, and I don’t like to talk while I work. Though I knew we weren’t going to finish that day. I suggested we stop, because he looked overwhelmed.

“We can clean tomorrow,” I told him. “I’ll come over during all my green schedule times.”

This only made him agitated, though. “I don’t want to stop. I want to fix it. I want—” He looked at my lips, and I knew he thought about kissing. But then he looked away, with a sad face. “I felt normal, while we were cleaning. I want to feel normal. I want to
be
normal.”

I felt so many things for Jeremey right then. I wanted to explain to him that he was normal, that we both were, that we were just different. I wanted to tell him I understood about feeling frustrated, about not wanting to wait, but I needed to explain about rushing. I didn’t know how to talk to him about the kissing. He needed me to speak, but I couldn’t even with the notepad.

That was when I thought of another way I could talk to Jeremey.

On my phone, I pulled up YouTube and went to my video favorites. I played him “Carly’s Cafe”.

Carly Fleischmann is a real girl, slightly younger than me, who has autism. She has severe autism with motor and speech disability, and she can’t talk unless she uses a computer. Until she was eleven, no one knew she could speak at all, until she used a keyboard to share words. Now she uses her computer all the time. She’s been on talk shows and has a lot of followers on Facebook and Twitter, and she’s written a book with her dad.

She also has a YouTube account, and one of her videos is a kind of ad for the book, where it explains a bit of what it’s like to be autistic, for her. It isn’t the same for me exactly, but it’s still a good video about how disability makes you feel trapped. I thought about how hard it was sometimes for Jeremey to talk, of how much better it was when he typed, so I showed him “Carly’s Cafe”.

The camera faces out like it’s Carly. We listen to her talk inside her head about how much she’d like a coffee, and she makes funny comments about the barista and other people in the cafe, but everyone talks to her as if she’s stupid. They don’t ask if she wants coffee, they offer orange juice or cocoa, and then they plan an afternoon differently than the one she wants to have. She can’t say what she wants, so she gets upset, and suddenly everything is too loud. The coffee grinder, the people talking, the water—everything is too much. Her sister leaves, and Carly reaches for the abandoned coffee, but her dad takes it away. Then he asks how he can help her, and the camera pulls back and you see her face.

Carly’s face is wrong. It doesn’t match the smart, sassy voice she has in her head. It’s this way every day for her, thinking things no one can hear. No one understands how different she feels inside from how she looks on the outside. I understand that. Feeling things I can’t express. Like how much I wanted to explain to Jeremey how Carly and he and I are all normal, that it’s fine, he doesn’t have to be upset. But I couldn’t, so I let Carly show him.

Jeremey cried.

When the video ended, he took the phone from my hand without asking and replayed it. I watched his face this time, trying to read it. It was so complicated, and I couldn’t. I could tell he felt a lot of emotions, but they were too difficult for me to read. Eventually he put the phone down. He shut his eyes, took a deep breath. When he spoke, his voice was rough and shaky. “That’s how I feel. All the time.
All the time.
”

I wanted to tell him I felt that way too, sometimes. I didn’t know how, though. So I talked about Carly. “She has a book. I have it. You can borrow it. I have it on Kindle and in paperback. Also audio.”

He put his hand on my leg. He started to give a light touch, then remembered and gave a heavy one. It made me feel good he remembered. “Thank you for showing me.”

I rocked a little. “Nobody is normal. Life is hard for everybody, sometimes.”

“Yes, but not everyone understands like you do, Emmet.”

I
was the one who had so many feelings then. Loud and hot and cold and spiky and soft. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t my brain octopus slowing me down. This was
me
unable to talk, unsure of how to tell Jeremey how I felt. It made no sense. He’d told me he liked me too, but those feelings were louder than my octopus. Louder than me.

To be with Jeremey meant managing my autism, my octopus and my feelings. It would be a great deal of work, all the time, more intense than the most complicated math problem in the world. Except this was so much more wonderful than any math problem could be.

For two weeks, every afternoon I wasn’t in class, I went to Jeremey’s house to help him clean his room.

Gabrielle still didn’t like me, but she loved Jeremey’s room getting cleaned. She always stuck her head in to ask us if we needed anything, and when I told her we could use some plastic storage bins, she asked me what size and went to the store to get them. She seemed impressed when I knew the exact dimensions without measuring. She tried to feed me, but I get nervous about other people’s food, so I always told her no thank you. I usually brought a water bottle and tiny cooler with a snack, so I was fine.

Jeremey was excited to get his room cleaned. By the end of the second day his headboard and space under his bed was all cleaned out, and I noticed he’d made his bed the way I taught him. When we got done cleaning every day, we sat on his bed together.

We didn’t kiss, but we were both thinking about it.

I wanted to kiss him, but I was nervous.

I taught him ASL instead. The alphabet, to start, and several common words. He enjoyed it, so one evening I brought him over to my house and gave him my old flash cards so he could practice. I showed him where to find online videos too. We watched several together, so I could help him make sure he had his hands right.

When the woman in the video showed the sign for
I love you
, we both blushed.

This embarrassment was becoming a problem, and I didn’t understand it. We were both gay, and he’d said he wanted me to kiss him. Why was it harder now to try doing it than it had been before? I tried to look it up online, but nobody seemed to know. I asked on one of the autism message boards, but they only said I should tell Jeremey my feelings and ask permission to kiss him. I
had
told Jeremey my feelings, but the idea of asking if I could kiss him made me, my feelings and the octopus act like one of those cats in the old cartoons that sticks to the ceiling.

I kept quiet, continuing to help him clean, teaching him ASL and some of my own signs. I showed him all my emotions shirts and told him what they mean when I wear them. I made him a small booklet with all my personal signs and shirts so he could study me. I asked if he had anything about himself he wanted me to learn, but he only shook his head and looked away.

For the first week, going slow was okay, but by the second week I realized we weren’t ever going to kiss unless I did something. I told myself I had until we finished sorting out his room to get ready, and then it was kissing time. This made me nervous. That’s a lot of pressure, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I masturbated every night, thinking about Jeremey, but it wasn’t enough anymore. I needed to kiss him.

I needed to kiss him
now
.

Thursday night of the second week we finished cleaning, and before we sat on his bed as we always did, I shut the door. I would have locked it, but he didn’t have a lock, so I closed it until I heard the
click
of the latch. The sound echoed too loudly in the room, and even though it’s silly to be nervous because of a door, I was.

I wondered if Jeremey felt the same way.

I sat beside him on the bed, sideways so I could face him. He fixed his gaze away from me. I wasn’t looking right at him either, but he doesn’t have camera eyes, so he didn’t see me at all. I think Jeremey sees feelings so loudly, sometimes looking at people even out of the corner of his eye makes them too intense. Except I understood then how frustrating I was for people without superpowers, because I wished he would look at me so I could try to read his expression and know if it was okay to kiss him.

I hummed, and I rocked.

Jeremey’s shoulders relaxed. He still didn’t look at me, but he took my hand.

His touch didn’t trigger my autism sensitivity. It made me brave, let me lean closer to finally get my kiss.

Starting was tricky. In my head I wanted us to melt together, to move gracefully into each other’s spaces, but my body doesn’t work that way. It’s clumsy. It doesn’t listen to me. I’m better than I used to be—I’ve done all kinds of therapy, but I still move differently. Add that Jeremey’s body is hesitant, and it meant our kiss was more of a thump. Jeremey made a noise of surprise. I kept my eyes open until our lips met, and he did too.

He shut his eyes, and so did I, and it was better.

He moved his lips over mine, making them wet. It was a little weird, but mostly it felt good to kiss him. It made my penis erect, made me want to touch him to see if he was erect too, but I didn’t. It was too easy to scare Jeremey.

But I promised myself sometime soon I would touch his penis.

When it got to be too much, I pulled back, but not far. When he nuzzled my nose too softly, I didn’t let the soft touch bother me.

“I want to be your boyfriend,” I told him.

Eyes shut, he rested his forehead against mine. “Emmet…I don’t think you get how messed up I am.”

“You need to stop saying bad things about yourself.”

His laugh was an odd sound. “I don’t know how to explain how impossible that is for me to do. I have negative voices all the time. Every day. They never stop.”

It made me sad, to think of Jeremey with those negative voices. I put my arms around him, and he put his head on my shoulder. I thought of movies I’d seen, commercials, thinking maybe we looked like one of those couples, sitting there. When I pressed a kiss on the side of his head, I was clumsier than they are in the movies, but that’s okay.

It was a great moment, almost perfect. I held Jeremey and counted the patterns in the wallpaper. I was about to tell him how many swirls he had on his north wall when his mom opened the door.

Things weren’t so perfect after that.