I love taking naps, and if you know Hebrew, just contain yourself and don't translate the sentence at the end - it's supposed to be a surprise. 

eleven

I flipped to the next page of my book, emitting a yawn. As it turned out, I happened to find the world of literary fiction much more interesting than the History of Building Boats and Stuff (or whatever the heck the name of my book was). Seriously, I had been reading for over an hour and it just got more boring by the minute. And at this point, I wasn’t even reading. I was just skimming the pages for buzzwords. Like, this must’ve been the ultimate sign of absolute boredom. I didn’t even want to play on my Xbox right now. Or sleep. I was experiencing the quintessence of boredom, and I didn’t like it.

           Suddenly, the hinges on my door creaked, so I looked over. The doorknob twisted and then the door itself opened, to reveal an all-too-energetic girl. She was smiling and appeared as though she had downed three shots of espresso before coming over. But right now, it wasn’t exactly Energy Time in the Brooks’ household.

           “Lilah! What are you doing here?” I whisper-yelled (no matter how oxymoronic the phrase was).

           “What I am doing here? I’m saying hi, Will,” she said, strolling over to my bed. She sat down by the foot and eyed the book in my hand.

           “At two o’clock on a Sunday?”

           “Yeah. Is there a problem with that?”

           “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s not even a single radio on, blasting NPR in my house right now. Do you know why that is?”

           “You’re parents finally realized that NPR is boring?” Lilah guessed.

           I shook my head with a sigh. “It’s naptime, Lilah.”

           “You still take naps?” She was more amused than she should’ve been.

           “Everyone—except for me and probably Charlie—is napping right now.”

           “Oh, is that what your parents call it?” I couldn’t even process the implication of a euphemism right now.

           “Shhh! I’m serious!” I reached a hand into my mouth and then extracted my retainer so that I could speak better. Then, I placed it back into its case on my bedside table.

           “You wear a mouth guard when you take naps?” Lilah exclaimed. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

           “It’s a retainer!” I defended. “My teeth didn’t magically get this perfect, and besides, I wasn’t taking a nap.”

           “I cannot believe that I have a crush on a guy who takes naps and wears a retainer when he takes them…”

           I didn’t even hear whatever scathing thing she said after the C-word was uttered. That was it. Everything else just left my brain. All that trivial information I had stored over the past hours about boats and how to build them? Gone. Every morsel of familial and personal history up to this point in time? Gone. I could barely even remember my name (Will Brooks—there might have been a roman numeral in there), let alone my address or the day or the time or anything else, for that matter. I was just hung up on that single, five-lettered word that was mostly reserved for elementary and middle school. But here it was again, making a small cameo in my existence.

           When I thought of the word “crush,” my mind went to this one girl in second grade. She always wore pigtails and dresses. Her handwriting was really neat, and I liked how she wrote her cursive H’s. Now, I could barely remember her name (something with a W or a T, maybe?), but at the time, I was very much aware it. I used to write her name all over my paper, because it had an H in it, and I used to try and mimic her H’s. This girl happened to be my very first crush. I was probably eight, and I thought she was really pretty and this one time she smiled at me, thus leading me to the conclusion that I was downright smitten with her.

           So like any other love struck eight-year-old, I went straight to my wise older brother about this slight dilemma. I told Charlie all about how this girl always had pigtails and wrote her H’s in cursive and wore dresses and smiled at me that one day. At the time, Charlie had his eye on a girl his own age and was glad to help me with my crush. He assured me that he would take care of everything. I wasn’t sure what exactly that meant, but then one day at recess (second and fourth grade had the same recess schedule), Charlie went right over to the girl and started talking to her. After that, she walked over to me—my heart was seriously pumping so fast—and told me that Charlie told her that I liked her. I didn’t deny it, and she said that she liked me, too. I was so freaking ecstatic. My feelings were reciprocated, and everything in my little world felt brighter and happier.

           Following our co-declaration of like (we were too young to deal with big kid stuff like “love”), our worlds became about each other. We would hold hands at recess and eat lunch together (she once gave me her chocolate chip cookie, and I gave her some of my pretzels), and during class, we would always elect to be partners or to sit next to each other. I practically gushed euphoria, despite my nagging friends persistently telling me that girls were gross. Nothing mattered to young William Brooks—I had the girl with the pigtails and fancy cursive H’s, and nobody could change that.

           About two weeks after we had professed our like during recess, however, she ended things abruptly. It was at recess, just to add a nice bookended symmetry to our love story. She came over to me and said, “Will, I don’t like you,” and then just walked away. I was devastated. It was my first experience of extreme heartbreak, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Who would hold my hand during recess? Who would be my partner during class? Who would sit with me at lunch? I didn’t have the girl anymore, and I was a wreck. Later, I found out that she dumped me because I had cooties (it wasn’t a professional diagnosis—her friend told her). And that was how my first real crush started and ended.

           Since second grade, I had had my fair share of “crushes” over the years. There was the tall girl with the green backpack in fourth grade, who had flat-out rejected me when I told her that I liked her. She was one of the reasons for my hesitancy with girls, though I had gotten over the event years ago. In fifth grade, I was infatuated with Valerie M (we had two Valeries in our class—M and D). Looking back on it now, she was pretty snobby, even for her age, but I didn’t care. She had straight brown hair and charm bracelet with hearts on it. I didn’t act on my feelings until the beginning of sixth grade, when we entered middle school (though, I went to a private K-8, so it was really the same school). I told Valerie M that I liked her, and she told me that I was her boyfriend. And so it went. I had my first girlfriend who also happened to be a long-time crush (it ended when Valerie decided that I was too “nice” and wanted someone “funner”). After Valerie, the list went on and on.

           But sometime along the way, crushes evaporated. It wasn’t a word I used anymore. I had girlfriends, and they came from a mutual sense of attraction and like. Though our association may have started out from a crush, we didn’t call it that. “Crush” was simply too juvenile. We were older. I either liked someone or I didn’t, and they either became my girlfriend or they didn’t. Sure, I would spend a few weeks pining after a girl, but it wasn’t a “crush” in the sense that she was the one girl I had my eye on. There were lots of girls. And usually, amidst those lots of girls, at least a few liked me—or, back in the day, had crushes on me.

           I was pretty sure that a cynical person whose feelings weren’t shared by their crush created the term “crush.” The word founder felt crushed, and decided to put it in the colloquial dictionary. Because I was a nice guy with a nice face and nice teeth and a nice background, rarely did I ever feel crushed by one of my crushes (except for that one tall girl with the green backpack). But in my recollection, I had done the crushing quite a few times. I felt bad, but I wasn’t that much of a pushover, so if I didn’t like a girl, I told her.

           There was this one Valentine’s Day in third grade, probably, and we all got to bring in candy and cards and put them in everyone’s mailbox or whatever. I had my eye on Riley Prescott (geez, I was a piece of work) at the time, but some other girl’s sights were set on me. She handed me a heart-shaped card and told me that she liked me and was wondering if I’d be her valentine. But, like, I was into Riley, and this girl was kind of weird (she liked horses—nuff said), so I turned her down as I gently as I could. I told her that I liked someone else, and then she ran away from me, crying. It probably took that girl every ounce of courage and bravery she had in her to tell me. And then I did the rejecting, making me out to be a dick who crushed a poor girl’s heart—on Valentine’s Day, mind you.

           That girl wasn’t the first or last girl that I rejected, and as I got older and more (or less) insightful about the intricacies of girls’ minds, I felt worse and worse about being the crusher. I knew how hard it was to admit feelings, so I always felt really bad about letting down a girl. Once, I felt so bad that I even ended up dating the girl that I was initially going to reject. She was pretty, but she was also kind of mean and scary, and she always picked on this one quiet girl, so I didn’t like her. But she was popular and she told me that she liked me, and I was about to say that I didn’t like her back, but then she gave me this whole sob story about how her gecko died, so I dated her for a week or two. It wasn’t fun, and she ended things, because I “didn’t show enough affection.” Whatever. That was then and this was now.

           Now, Lilah Tov was on the foot of my bed and she was looking at me, waiting for me to say something—anything—but I couldn’t, because of what she had just said. Like, I knew that she thought I was cute (okay, she thought that I was “pretty,” but that was basically the same thing), but adding the word “crush” put everything on a completely different level. Because having a “crush” on someone usually started off with physical attraction, but the more you got to know that said crush, things typically escalated, and the crush was formed on a both physical and mental attraction. So, in summary, I was pretty sure that Lilah had just indirectly said that she liked me—like, my personality and mind and all that shit. To say I was stoked would be the exact opposite of a hyperbole.

           When I was done internally analyzing everything, I replied to Lilah like the loser I was: “Uh, what?”

           “I have a crush”—there was that word again—“on a guy who naps with his retainer. Keep up, Willy B.” This was the second time she was calling me that. Willy B. My name (Will) was a sobriquet, so I always found a little odd when somebody nicknamed that, because c’mon, there wasn’t much you could do with Will. But Lilah Tov seemed to be adamant on Willy B, despite it sounding like a wallaby’s rapper name. Will suited me pretty well (I had an amazing sense of self, as I had learned over the years), but Willy B was, like, alternative and weird and so informal—all of which I wasn’t. Lilah liked it, and, well, I kind of did, too.

           Instead of saying something clever in response to Lilah that would make her think I was cool or sharp, I just sputtered out, “Oh, uh, yeah,” and left it at that.

           “So, Will, what do you want to do?”

           There was a lot that I wanted to. I wanted to run my fingers through Lilah’s hair. I wanted to hug her and just, like, be with her. I wanted to lie in bed with her and keep talking without hitting an awkward lull in conversation. Oh, and I also wanted to kiss her until we ran out of air. But of course, I didn’t say any of that. I just said, “Read,” and held up my book.

           “Read?” reiterated the girl. She then snatched my book away from me and read the name aloud: “The History of Building Boats, a Historiography. Wow. Sounds like a real page-turner, Will. Like, for fanning yourself with, that is. Not for reading. What idiot recommended it to you?”

           “My grandpa.”

           “Figures. Old people love stuff like this,” Lilah stated like it was a fact right out of an encyclopedia. She set the book down on my bed, and stood up, her eyes roving around the room. “Will, do you have a computer in here? Actually, of course you do. What I meant to ask, Will, is where is your computer.”

           “On, uh, my desk,” I answered, pointing over to the location of my computer. I wasn’t sure why she wanted it or if she planned on using it, but I sure as heck hoped that I hadn’t left up any porn during my last session on it. That would just be mortifying.

           Lilah easily found my laptop, and muttered a, “Classic,” as she picked up the silver object encased in a Herschel case. She eased it out from the fabric protector and then brought it back over to my bed. Sitting down, she placed my computer on her lap and then opened it up. The moment of truth. I exhaled at sight of my generic background of waves and nothing else. Lilah then got onto the internet and swiftly found her way on to Netflix. I was already logged in, so she just typed something up and thankfully didn’t dwell on the past movies I had watched.

           Soon, a title surfaced and Lilah clicked on it. As it began to load, Lilah moved from the edge of my bed to the back. She pushed me aside so that she, too, could lean up against the headboard. The laptop was on her legs, and that circle thing kept making rotations, signifying the readying of the movie. I grabbed a pillow, lifted up my laptop, and then put the pillow on Lilah’s legs, followed by the laptop. She thanked me quietly, and then the movie began.

           It started off with a game of croquet. And then it just got increasingly more twisted from there. Lilah seemed to love every minute of it, but I just got really confused. Especially towards the end, it just seemed kind of out of the blue and random and I had no idea what was going on. But Lilah was on my bed, next to me, and she grabbed my hand and meshed it with hers, so I didn’t complain once about the strange movie. I just shut up and enjoyed the fact that Lilah was enjoying it. Even if it was one of the oddest movies I had ever seen.

           When it was over, Lilah opened up the floor for questions with a, “So. That was Heathers. Any questions?”

           “That’s your favorite movie?” I said.

           “Yeah,” she nodded. “Wasn’t it great?”

           “Uh…I was a little confused,” I admitted sheepishly.

           “About which part?”

           “Like, when did the guy go from sweet to a homicidal killer?”

           “Oh, he was always a homicidal killer.”

           “Uh huh. But he just started out making eye contact with the girl—”

           “Veronica.”

           “Yeah, with Veronica, and by the end of the movie, he’s kind of a total maniac.”

           “He was always a maniac.”

           “Right,” I settled on, instead of pursuing my issue any longer. It just didn’t really make sense to me why the director made the male protagonist such a sociopath when the movie was probably marketed to girls who just liked his face. What really threw me, though, was that the whole movie just took such a dark, dark turn. “So, why is that your favorite movie?”

           “Because Veronica is kickass, and Christian Slater was gorgeous back in eighty-nine,” she said simply. I couldn’t argue with her reasoning, so I didn’t. “Also, I just think that it’s cool how it starts off as a chick flick, but then by the end is just, like, isn’t.” She shut my laptop and removed it and the pillow from her lap.

           “I get that,” I said, “it’s just not really…my cup of tea. Except, I’m not really a huge tea-drinker, anyway. I like coffee more. But whenever I visit my grandparents, we always have to have tea. Like, my grandma has this teapot and these teacups and tea is kind of gross, to tell you the truth. And shit, I’m rambling again, aren’t I?”

           “I figured that you wouldn’t really like Heathers,” was what Lilah got out of my digression, “but now you can say that you’ve seen it, so mazal tov.”

           “Mazal tov. What’s the correct response to that?” I inquired.

           “Most people just say ‘thank you.’”

           “How do you, uh, say that in Hebrew?”

           “Todah.”

           Even though I was pretty sure that she was going to laugh at me, I split the word into two syllables and tried it out for myself: “Toe-da.”

           And sure enough, Lilah laughed. And laughed. And laughed. But I didn’t care, because she was in my room, on my bed, next to me, and we had just watched her disturbingly favorite movie, so even if she was making fun of my poor attempt at an entirely foreign language, I didn’t care. When she stopped laughing, she gave me a piece of advice: “Will, stick to English and maybe French. Like, I wouldn’t even speak Spanish if I were you. You’d probably accidentally offend someone.”

           “Oh, c’mon! Give me a Hebrew sentence and I’ll say it just like you do,” I urged.

           She skeptically stared at me for a moment, and then gave in. “Ani rotza le-nashek otcha.”

           So, to the very best of my abilities, I copied her words: “Ah-nee, rosa, la-na-sheck, ot-ha.” When I was done, I asked, “How was that?”

           “Stick to English, Will. Please.”

           I grinned. “What does that sentence mean?”

           Lilah smirked at me and then said, “If you could say it right, maybe I’d tell you…”

           And I decided right there and then that I would say that sentence correctly, no matter how many failed attempts (which, knowing me, would be quite a few) it took.