Not so super -- Chapter 7
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Can’t wait to “see” you in Starbucks :-)
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About a week later, Mom and I were back on our walk. I had woken, early Saturday morning, to find Channy’s DM waiting for me. Since then, it had been hard for me to think about anything else. Mom was chattering about the latest developments in her professional life. I was trying to listen. I wasn’t succeeding. No matter what Mom talked about, my mind was drawn back to the same subject.
Our route, the same route we had taken ever since our first walk, took us all around the outskirts of MIT.
MIT.
Apparently, that’s where Channy went when she wasn't haunting my life. I couldn't imagine that girl, who had twice exploded onto my scene, sitting in some lecture hall filled with geeks. To be honest, I had a hard time thinking of her as real person at all. Every time I tried to imagine her life, I drew a blank. From my perspective, she was some kind of mysterious demon that existed only when she was tormenting me.
I was awash in mixed emotions after that conversation in the library. As I watched her leave, I breathed out a sigh of relief. She was too creepy for me. And smug. And uncomfortable to be around. I vowed that I was going to let things drop. I wasn’t going to create that twitter account and I wasn’t going to go looking for her.
I didn't last three minutes.
I watched her leave, hips still swinging. A minute later, I created LittleTwerp. Just as she had promised, MyFakeWife already existed. Somewhere, where my primitive brain did all the thinking, I knew that she was right. For ten years I had struggled to preserve my secret. This had meant that I couldn’t talk to anybody -- not Mom, not my friends, not anyone. Channy’s warning, that I needed to talk about this, had struck home. I couldn’t keep my fingers from following MyFakeWife.
With a great sense of unease, I tucked my phone into my pocket and headed back to my friends. They all looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to spill my guts. I knew what they wanted to hear. They wanted me to talk about the girl. They couldn’t believe that there was a girl. But there was nothing I could say. She was the eye of the hurricane. Any conversation that began with Channy ended with me hearing voices and being carted off to an asylum. I sat down resolutely and started talking about our group project. For several seconds, three disappointed faces eyed me with disbelief. Then the boyz reluctantly picked up their work.
Within minutes, my phone buzzed. I reached into my pocket and looked at the notification. MyFakeWife had followed me back. I stared at the phone and let it sink in. I had followed her instructions. I had set things in motion. We were going to talk. I set the phone down again and tried to return my focus to our work. It was no good.
“Sorry guys, I gotta go,” I apologized.
I got two knowing looks from Kenneth and Dro and one disapproving brood from Gers. I was letting them down, but what choice did I have? The noise in my head came entirely from me, and it was drowning out everything else. I had to talk to this girl. I had to see what would happen.
I walked out of the library and headed for home. I wanted to get someplace safe. I wanted solitude from which I could reach for her. But I couldn’t wait. I only got two blocks from the library before I had to act. I leaned against a fence on Prospect street and typed out a direct message, a DM.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
Hey
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While I watched the phone sit dormant, I contemplated the need for a new opening line. I stared at the screen, as if I could summon this demon.
I did.
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Hey! I’m in class. Let’s talk in 90 minutes.
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Not “can we talk in 90 minutes?” but “Let’s talk in 90 minutes.” I wondered whether I had heard her ask a single question since I met her. Of course I hadn’t. Why should she ask questions when she already knew what the future held?
“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”
Mom, on the other hand, had plenty of questions. This one jarred me from my
reverie to reality. We turned the corner onto Binney Street, at the back of Tech Square.
“Sorry, Mom, I kind of zoned out around the part about the new client.”
“Sweety! That was five minutes ago! I was just saying that if the new client, Walkens, was really willing to give me those kinds of hours, I could easily drop two other clients. I would dearly like to do so -- I’m not enjoying working for Commerce or Bankers’ at all. But I have to say, my conversations with the CEO of Walkens have been getting really strange…”
No matter how strange Mom’s conversations had been getting, they couldn't possibly have topped the ones I was having with Channy. As she promised, my phone buzzed ninety minutes later. By the time I got her DM, I was home, alone.
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
I'm back in my dorm. Ask me anything.
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Over the days that followed, those three words surrounded me. “Ask me anything" described our early conversations perfectly. I would ask questions and she would provide answers. It was weird and almost mechanical. Sometimes, to break up the monotony, I would volunteer facts about myself. But she never asked questions. And despite being willing to answer any question I asked, she never volunteered information. I thought I understood why -- she didn’t need to ask me questions, she had already dreamt all about me. This game was just about letting me catch up.
That afternoon, into the evening, I asked whatever inane question came into my head. I learned a lot about her life. Her parents lived in Detroit. Her dorm overlooked the Charles River. She wasn't quite five feet tall. She hated being under five feet tall.
The next day, I started getting bolder. Buoyed by the answers I was receiving, I started to ask increasingly personal questions. In reality, I was edging closer to what I really wanted to investigate -- her superpower.
“I see that I've lost you again.”
Mom was trying to be patient with my lack of attention, but I could sense a growing frustration each time I faded. These walks had become one of the highlights of our weeks and I was ruining it. But how could I participate when virtually everything reminded me of Channy?
“Don't get me wrong, it's great to see you so happy. But what's gotten into you?” Mom pressed.
“Oh, well, you know,” I started, lamely. “The math team is really clicking right now. I think we might have a shot.”
“You can't fool Mama. This is about that girl, Little Miss Love at First Sight.”
I felt a great whoosh of cold as blood left every extremity to concentrate in my blushing cheeks.
“No, this isn't about any girl,” I lied.
Certainly not a girl with a smug, serene smile. A sudden blush made me avoid Mom’s gaze. We kept our power pace up, she looking at me, me looking anywhere else.
“You haven't asked her out, yet, have you?”
Every liar knows that the small ones are easier to maintain. Mom offered me a lifeline and I seized it.
“No. No, I haven't.”
And in truth, I hadn't. I had never, since meeting Channy, asked her on a date. I had no desire to be in the same room with this girl who claimed to be my future wife. Even after all of the DMs, the idea of being with her made me nervous. I couldn’t imagine that she was any more interested in dating than was I. She was a lot older than me -- three years as it turned out. What did nineteen year-olds do on dates? Probably not what Kenneth and Linda did. Nineteen year-olds would do mature things. I couldn’t imagine trying to act mature for a whole date. And I couldn’t believe that Channy could bear to be with a kid like me for a whole date. This entire relationship was ridiculous on its face. Envisioning a shared slice of pizza only made it worse.
I wasn’t ready to talk about her. Not with Mom. Not with anyone. Not even with my friends who had actually met her.
“I understand, Honey,” Mom said, stepping up, onto the sidewalk. She cocked her head thoughtfully, hands on her hips, and chewed on one lip. “I don’t want to smother you. But I do want you to tell me if you start seeing her. Your mama raised you to treat women -- and girls -- right. I want to make sure that you’re becoming a proper gentleman.”
Seeing her. Well I certainly was seeing her, several times per hour. It started within forty-eight hours of that day in the library.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
Can I have a picture of you?
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Sure!
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And along it came. It arrived as an attachment. I downloaded it to my phone to open it. I almost thought that she was playing a joke on me. I didn’t recognize her in the photo at all. But the more I stared at it the more I came to see her in that oddly off-putting jpeg. My best guess was that she had sent me the photo she had used for her Freshman directory. While it was definitely her, everything about it was off.
Her hair was dull and mousy, but in my head it was rich, dark and lustrous. She wasn't wearing her glasses, and her eyes looked comically small. There were other things, too, things that looked wrong. In the picture, she was flat, not curvy at all. Her shoulders were narrow. The effects combined to make her look almost boyish. Nothing about her in Starbucks or the library, had ever struck me as boyish. If anything, she was more woman than I was prepared to handle. But I was beginning to doubt my recollections. Maybe this was reality. Maybe the memory was just a side effect of her startling entrance into my life.
I would have rejected it as a fake but for one thing -- that smile. I could just imagine a page full of freshman, each putting on his or her cheesiest take-my-picture smile. And right in the center of the page, the smug, serene smile of the girl who already knew how college would turn out.
So had I been seeing her? Yeah, I had. Whenever I got a moment to myself, I opened my phone and looked at that picture. It wasn't right, it wasn't her. But it was the only thing I had to remind me that I wasn't the only freak out there, that I was no longer alone.
“... and that’s why I worry about you, Ricky.”
Well, Mom did worry about me. Both of my parents had, back when I was talking about the voices. But that had been nothing compared to what Channy had gone through. Still, it was amazing how similar our “coming of age” stories had been.
Like me, Channy couldn’t remember a time before the dreams, before she became who she now was. But, also like me, there was a definite “before” and “after” that loomed large in her history. For Channy, it was one morning in day care, before she even entered kindergarten. What took me months of therapy to learn, Channy figured out in a single day.
She was four at the time. Although she had clearly dreamt that day before, she never dreamt it again. She doesn’t talk of “remembering” anything about it. She only knows what her parents told her. However, from their imperfect narrative, she was able to piece together what must have happened.
She imagined a little girl who was reliving a dream for the first time. The four year old looked for queues from the adults, but they had none to offer. Little Channy couldn't handle it.
And when I say that she couldn’t handle it, I mean that catastrophically. She began screaming and wouldn't stop. The other children ran from her. The teachers tried to help her, lowering her into a lap. But she was beyond help. She lay rigid, screaming, unable to make sense of her living dream.
Out of options, they put her in an ambulance and took her to the hospital. Her parents, horrified by the thought of her in a hospital, rushed to meet her there. By the time the ambulance arrived, the screaming had stopped but Channy was unresponsive. She lay listlessly in the hospital while her parents fretted. It would be days before she returned to normal. The experience would have a deep and lasting impact on her family.
Channy was an only child -- that’s something else we had in common. But that similarity ended there. I had been an accident that temporarily derailed my folks as they rocketed up their career paths. Siblings may have come along eventually, but for Dad’s decision to run out on Mom. By contrast, Channy’s folks always intended to stop at one child. Channy was to be their pride and legacy. On that day, when Channy was brought to the hospital, everything changed. She became the fragile child who must be looked after and protected with all of their attention. Channy loved her parents, but they smothered her in protection. Every symptom that manifested caused her to receive a parade of medicines, each stranger than the last. Channy shuddered to think of the vast amount they must have spent on her over those years.
“I’m not going to hold the door all day, Rick,” Mom said, glaring at me through what remained of her patience. “I swear, there’s something off about you today.”
And not just today. For years, I had known that there was something different about me. I had taken great pains to hide it from the rest of the world. But then Channy waltzed into my life and gave us the opportunity to be different together. She had been through the same thing, or close enough to it. Eventually, she had learned to hide her difference from the rest of the world. It was liberating to hear about someone who had travelled that very same path.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
How did you figure out that you were different?
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
I guess that I always knew. And I received daily reminders to drive the point home.
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When she was young, she prattled on to her friends about her dreams, like I had done to my parents. Early on, all of her friends described their dreams. But as she grew, she noticed that her dreams were about prosaic things, about being older. Her friends dreamt crazy things, like flying and having adventures. As they grew, her friends tired of her stories and she felt increasingly isolated. One friend, Julie, would continue to listen to her, but even Julie was destined to drift away.
I was endlessly fascinated with her dreams. It was so strange to hear about someone who was different, like me, but in such a different way. I became increasingly hungry to hear about her dreams.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
When you relive your dreams, is it always exactly as you remember it?
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
You have so little faith in the future!
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Late in high school, this had been a huge obsession for Channy: was she acting out predestined futures or exercising free will? It always felt like she had the option to change her future, but she feared to deviate from the lines her dreams had provided. Although she never had that preschool dream again, she doubted that the hysterical screaming had been part of the script. But she felt so much pressure to get her lines right that it was hard for her to determine how much choice she had.
In junior year of high school, the year I was now in, she took a chance. She found herself, in a class, acting out that more-than-deja vu experience. She fidgeted in her seat, her feet barely touching the floor. She recognized the t-shirts across from her -- yellow, blue, gold, red -- just as they had been in her dream. Her teacher was about to ask her about the difference between the Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She knew the answer. She’d heard it from herself.
Mentally, she looked through her script. She found nothing remarkable in what was to come. She opted to experiment. Her teacher called on her to talk about the difference between penance and penitence. Instead of answering it, she uttered pure nonsense, a series of random words.
Channy, then and now, was a model student. To do anything other than what was expected of her was unthinkable. She watched as the ripples emanated from her, throughout the room. Some of the things that followed were reminiscent of her dream. Some, like the anxious look from her teacher, were not.
She earned herself a talk after class and more concern from her parents, but inside, she beamed. She was alive with the understanding that her dreams were gifts of knowledge, not orders to be followed. Despite the script, she retained free will.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
If everything can change, how do you know when you're in those dreams?
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
The pond is the best metaphor.
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Channy imagined going through life as an intrepid explorer, hiking through deep woods. For the most part, she encountered the trees, shrubs, and undergrowth that make up what we all encounter in our daily lives. But occasionally she would stumble across a serene, glacial pond, its surface as smooth as glass. This was how she imagined those pre-dreamt patches of her immediate future. When she faced one, she had no option to turn back, go around or even over them. Her only option was to walk, as carefully as she could, across the surface of the lake. If she walked perfectly, the pond would remain smooth. But with every imperfect step she created ripples.
The ripples would start from under her feet. Even light ripples would propagate outwards, but the pond would remain claim. Stronger ripples could cause turbulence throughout the pond. At worst, her missteps could create waves that would crash against the muddy bank and tear chunks out of it. Channy thought of the bank as the setting of the dream -- the walls, the weather, the people in the scene. These were the foundations of dreams. These were the core of the gift she had received while the dream’s outer layers retreated from her recollection.
I couldn't help suppressing a shudder at the Jesus-like image she had conjured. Channy believed herself to be the sole cause of the ripples, which only furthered my unease. If Channy deviated from the script, everybody else would as well, and the scene would become less familiar. I asked about how I might have changed the scene. I thought that maybe my poor repartee had affected what happened. She failed to understand me. It was like she couldn’t conceive of anyone else being able to deviate off of the script in her head.
“Rick,” mom sounded exasperated, “I asked you to find us a table!”
I knew that. I really did. But the minute I looked around, my eyes settled on her table. Its very presence shot me back to that moment when she caught my eye and made me feel... Everything. Idiotic, guilty, self-conscious, angry, anxious and oddly interested in love at first sight. Love? That still made no sense to me. I could never fall in love with someone so smug, weird, and scary.
I asked a lot about the dream that had brought her there. Some prophetic dreams came and went, but others returned repeatedly. This dream, the dream of Starbucks, returned dozens of times. She first began dreaming it when she was much younger. At the time, she was romantically taken by this older boy to whom she would announce her future marriage. But every time she dreamed it, she felt older and the boy never aged. It took her many years to understand what that meant. Still, the dream was with her always, a better companion then any real friend. But she was unable to guess when it would happen.
When she was sixteen, sensing that she was about the same age as the boy of her dreams, she roped her friends into a project. By then, dreams were no longer spoken of. She had no friends who would listen. Instead, she challenged them to try out every Starbucks in Detroit. A google search revealed more than fifty. Many friends signed on and they visited one or two each week. Over their drinks, they would be catty. They would compare the location, the decor, the baristas. But Channy would sit there serenely, if not smugly, striking another location from the list of potential places to meet her man.
By senior year, she had come to accept that I was not in Detroit. The dream was further than usual from her mind when it was time to go on college tours. She told her parents that she planned to go to MIT. Although they wisely urged her to visit other schools, a trip to Cambridge was arranged. Nothing had prepared her for the shock. As the taxi pulled up in front of the student center she found herself sweating, struggling to breathe. Massachusetts Avenue, the serpent that cuts through Cambridge and Boston, was unmistakably the street from her dream. She tumbled out onto the sidewalk and looked to her left and right. Somewhere, in one of those directions, was her Starbucks.
During Freshman orientation, she walked up and down Mass Ave until she hit Central Square.
There it was.
She savored the moment, a thrill running through her. With equal parts anticipation and trepidation, she pushed through the door. But the muddy bank wasn’t right. There was different clientele at the tables, different baristas behind the counter. Even the decor, on which she was an expert, was subtly different from what it would be. Walking a half-inch shorter, she returned to campus. The time had not yet come.
Last summer, a quiet signal dramatically heralded the approaching moment. While scooping up her knapsack at the public library in Detroit, the zipper broke, irreparably. She went to the local store to buy a new one and saw a black knapsack with purple highlights. Immediately, she recognized it from her dream. Its purchase set her on a collision course with me. From her dream, she sought out subtle clues as to the time of year, time of day and day of week. She had narrowed it down to an autumnal, Saturday, early morning. She waited for me, week after week. Each time, she was there to open the store. Each time, she left after lunch -- until, “thank God,” she saw us come in.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
Was it like the dream?
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Not entirely. There were some big ripples. :-(
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Channy had had this dream many times. No two instances of the dream were identical. But there were some constants. It was always brief, just as I had experienced it. But, in her dream, I was generally excited. It was a moment of connection. We both rejoiced in finally meeting someone like ourselves. But that’s not how it played out. Channy, always the source of the ripples, blamed herself. As nearly as she could tell, her special dreams were truly prophetic -- they predicted both the things that would happen and the way people would respond. But I didn’t respond properly. I was frightened and anxious and not at all excited. She knew that she had changed the script, but she didn’t know how.
The library was different. She only had that dream once, after we met. She had much less time to think about that meeting and barely knew her lines. Instead, she went on instinct. She crafted what she had dreamed about me -- the many, many dreams she had about me -- into her own words and acted to save a relationship that was surely always meant to be.
Somehow, I got there in the end. She had always dreamed that I would realize the opportunity to speak to someone like me. And I had, once I had gotten past that initial shock.
"For God’s sakes, you haven’t touched your drink. Let’s just go home.”
Mom was done with me. I couldn’t blame her. This was supposed to have been our special time together and I was ruining it. I stumbled to my feet and followed Mom out the door. I couldn’t help but think about the disparity between my broken conversation with Mom and the flowing Twitter dialog with Channy.
Although Channy and I certainly explored her superpower, that was only a small piece of what we talked about. Channy had invited me to ask her anything, and I accepted the challenge. I started out timidly, asking for her favorite color (pink), bands (none), and other trivial things (cherries, flannel and spiders). If this bothered Channy, I couldn’t tell from her answers. She answered every question openly and generously, usually within seconds. I came to find it strange. I wondered at the image of her, interrupting important things to tell me that she preferred puppies to kittens.
But that wasn’t the only weird thing about the experience. The strange asymmetry of our relationship began to grate on me. I found it disconcerting to read through our exchange. She supplied lots of open answers, but no questions. Unconsciously, I began to increase the temerity of my questions. I asked about her most embarrassing memory -- being yelled at for shattering a cupboard full of glassware. I asked about her saddest memory -- when Julie, had finally told her to ‘grow up.’ And last night, I went even further.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
Do you ever go commando?
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Her answer came quickly.
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
I think that *I* may have learned more from that question than *you’ll* learn from my answer :-0
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I stared at the DM with equal parts disappointment and relief. I’m not sure what put the image in my head. Maybe I just wanted to know how girls worked. Maybe I had been talking to Dro too much. But honestly, I was relieved to discover that she had her limits. I was relieved that “anything” didn’t mean she would answer whatever horrible thing came into my head to ask. I would be getting up early for my walk tomorrow. Reluctantly, I turned out my light and was about to call it a night, when the phone buzzed several times in rapid succession.
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Sorry, LOL. I have too much OCD for that. Underwear was invented for a reason!
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
But...
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Sometimes...
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
When I’m up to my ears in finals and there’s no time for laundry...
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
A girl doesn’t always dress to the nines ;-)
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Utter confusion was slowly replaced by a childish warmth of naughty delight. I enjoyed the image we had put in my head and sent her a haphazard goodnight. She knew that I needed my early Friday nights and let the conversation drop.
“For crying out loud, I don’t know what you have to grin about.”
I promptly wiped the smile from my face.
Mom unlocked the front door, and then the inner door that led into our little apartment. Mom finished off her drink and then popped mine into the fridge. I was standing listlessly against the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room. Mom gave me an appreciative look.
“I think we need to get you into bed,” she sighed. Then she gave me a wan smile and added “you are going to see her today, aren’t you?”
“No, I'm not going to see her,” I argued. Unless she counted the jpeg.
Though unsatisfied with my answer, Mom let me retire through the curtain that blocked off my bedroom from the living room. As I changed into my pajamas, I reflected on our exchange from last night. I had gone too far, but not far enough. Now I had to know. I pulled out my phone.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
You said ask me anything...
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
I did!
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
Do you really mean *anything*?
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Try me!
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
Have you ever done it?
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There was, for Channy, a surprisingly long pause. Had I finally crossed that line?
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
LOL. Having seen you at 50 it's easy to forget how *young* you are… You're asking if I've had sex.
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My face flushed with shame. The question sounded ridiculous when it came from her.
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**Rick Smith
@LittleTwerp
Yeah.
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
Nope.
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Oh. I wasn’t sure whether I was disappointed.
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
I came close twice, but chickened out both times.
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
I prefer to think of myself as “making prudent choices.”
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**Channing
@MyFakeWife
To be honest, I'm glad that I'm saving myself.
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My hands were typing away, about to press for more details when my gut lurched sideways. Suddenly, the enormity of what she had said hit me.
She was saving herself.
For marriage.
For her future husband.
For me.
I turned my head and looked in the mirror, at the awkward, geeky, pimply kid who stared back at me.
I marveled at the boundless faith Channy had in her dreams.
