Dead Fish Can’t Break Your Heart
Four hours. That’s how long I’ve been in the car with my mom.
We spent the first three arguing, but for this last one we mixed it up and sat in the most uncomfortable silence imaginable.
Even the windshield wipers are on edge. They’re traveling through their arc at an alarming rate, but it’s no use. The snow started when my mom and I gave up on talking, and it hasn’t let up since.
So I almost jump out of my seat when she says, “What does that sign say?” in a panicked voice, leaning as far forward as her seat belt will allow.
“Uh, which one?” It’s impossible to locate any identifiable shape through the whiteout.
“Never mind.” She puts on a pointless turn signal and maneuvers off the highway.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“I’m pulling off I-95,” she snaps. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
That shuts me up. Well, that and the fact that I don’t want to distract her, lest we die in a car wreck.
We’re in a more residential area now, and the snow’s coming down even harder than it was a minute ago. It streams toward the windshield in well-defined flakes illuminated by our Subaru’s headlights.
And that’s when I see her.
“Mom—”
She’s crossing the street. A girl, wearing a red beanie and a puffy coat.
All of my muscles tense and I press my foot into the matted rug as if I could hit the brakes from the passenger side and stave of
f tragedy by sheer force of will.
My mom glances over at me. She clearly hasn’t noticed the girl, and she picks the worst possible moment to rehash the argument we’ve spent most of the car ride having: “Are you sure this internship is what you want?”
She’s not stopping.
“Mom!”
We’re going to hit her.
“MOM, WATCH OUT!”
“FUCK!”
The girl must not have noticed us either, because she turns her head in shock and stares right at me.
Time stops.
We’re going to kill her.
And it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t been terrible to my mom this whole car ride, she wouldn’t be so angry and distracted. And if she wasn’t so angry and distracted, we wouldn’t be on a collision course with an actual, very-much-alive (for the moment) human being.
To be fair, I can’t account for the blizzard, but at least 85 percent of this is my fault.
Because, of course, after all the shit I’ve been through this past week, I might as well add murder to the list too.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” my mom had asked earlier in the trip, somewhere along the monotonous factories of the New Jersey highway. She looked at me for way too long before turning back to the road.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t like the idea of you spending Christmas away.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said again, teeth clenched.
“You’ve never been away for Christmas. Do you realize that? Never.”
“We don’t even celebrate Christmas,” I said to her, but it felt pretty unnecessary considering the sheer quantity of Jewish guilt she’d been laying on me the entire car ride.
“All the same, Shani, it’s the holidays.” She swerved a bit into the lane next to ours as she spoke, and a lime-green Mazda honked at us. She flipped them off.
“Is it, though? Like, is it really the holidays?” The brightly colored car sped past us. “Hanukkah’s over, and it’s complete bullshit anyway. It was invented by American capitalists so that Jewish kids could be included in the Christian hegemony.”
I was proud of myself for using the word hegemony.
“Is that what they’re teaching you at college?”
“No,” I said, pouting a little. “I’ve always thought that.”
“Yeah, you’ve always hated the eight days of thoughtful gifts I’ve given you.” She swerved again, but into the lane on the other side of her, which was very egalitarian, I thought.
“Okay, jeez.”
I sighed loudly and crossed my arms. I knew I was being childish and combative and all-around awful. But no matter what she said, she wasn’t going to convince me to stay at home in Queens for the holidays. My mom and I had been snapping at each other from the moment she picked me up from my first semester of college, just three short (but at the same time incredibly, unendingly long) days ago.
Maybe she would’ve understood if I told her why I was feeling this way, but I couldn’t do that.
If I was being honest, here’s how I wanted to respond to my mom’s request: “Sure, yeah, I’d love to stay home for the holidays. But, now that you mention it, the thought of being in our apartment for winter break makes me want to rip all my teeth out, one by one.”
For the three days I was home, all I did was avoid my mom’s gaze and respond to her perfectly reasonable questions with one-word answers. I had reverted back to being a petulant child.
Because the thing no one tells you about going away to college is that even if your first semester beats you to a pulp and leaves you with no faith in humanity, it doesn’t feel better to be at home. The couch no longer remembers your butt, the floor creaks in places it never used to, and your mom will switch the mug cabinet with the plate cabinet (which you’ll fight about, of course, because you’ll take any excuse you have to be shitty to her).
And all of my anger—all of it—is because
of Sadie.
Sadie had told me she loved me on a Thursday. I’d been too anxious to tell her that I loved her before then, because I thought three months was too soon. We started dating two days into first-year orientation, and I knew I loved her, well, two days into first-year orientation.
All semester, we had a perfect routine: we’d sit in her dorm when her roommate wasn’t there and watch Netflix. We mostly stuck to crafting-based competition shows, though we also watched all the movies in the “LGBTQ Movies” category.
Well, except the ones where women had sex. It would be too awkward to watch other people doing something we had thus far been too scared to do.
Or at least that I’d been too scared to do.
But even when I was just sitting with her, watching TV, my neck hurting from leaning against her shoulder, I felt a tug at my chest and I knew it was love.
I was all the lesbian stereotypes in one and I didn’t care. They were stereotypes for a reason. I pictured our wedding, rustic and small. Neither of us would wear white, and all the guests would leave saying things like, “That challenged my conception of what a wedding is and, frankly, what it should be!”
“I don’t really believe in this,” Sadie had said to me on the Thursday in question, “but I just thought you should know.”
“Know what?” I asked, looking up at her from my well-worn spot on her shoulder. I knew what she was going to say would be serious because she had paused Jeopardy!
She stared straight ahead as she said, “Th
at I love you.”
I immediately told her I loved her too
But after that I was stressed, because if we were in love, then the next logical step was sex. And seeing as I had never done it before, I felt like I needed to prepare.
So I Googled some unhinged key words on a very private browser. I even cut my nails short because I knew that was something queer women were supposed to do. But when the time came for us to have sex, none of my preparation mattered. Because . . .
Oh god. This is so embarrassing.
Okay. We had sex for the first time a couple of days after we said “I love you,” and, as it turned out, it was also the last time. That Sunday, she texted me that we needed to talk, and an hour later we had broken up. And two hours after that, I was heading home for winter break.
I can’t think about this right now. I’m going to vomit.
The worst thing is, I’m not even mad at Sadie. If she were here in the car, I’d probably beg her to take me back. Because I’m pathetic, and she was the first girl I ever dated.
I didn’t tell my mom about Sadie, so she must think I’ve been sad and angry for no reason. I had planned on telling my mom about our relationship over winter break, but now that we’re broken up, there’s no point.
I’d have to tell her that I was dating a girl, and that I like girls, and, oh yeah, now that you mention it, the aforementioned girl and I are no longer dating because something went horribly wrong seventy-two hours after we said “I love you.”
“You can stay, you know,” my mom had said yet again later in the car ride.
“What?”
“It’s not too late. I’ll turn the car around right now.” She’d demonstrated her commitment to this statement by sharply turning the steering wheel to the left. She was met with a chorus of honks and had briefly removed both hands from the wheel for maximum flip-off ability.
“I really can’t,” I’d told her in a flat voice that I hated hearing coming out of my mouth. “I need to do this internship.”
“You don’t need to do anything.”
“Well, I’m not going back to New York. This is an amazing opportunity for me. Do you know how many first-years have ever gotten into this lab?” When she didn’t answer I said, “One. Just me. I get to study fish evolution with the best paleoichthyologist in the entire world. So, no, I’m not staying home.”
She was silent for a moment, and I thought I’d won until she said, “If you’re going to study dead animals, why not dinosaurs? Everyone loves dinosaurs.”
“Oh my god, Mom. Literally stop.”
She was never going to get how big of a deal it was that I got this Smithsonian internship. Dr. Charles Graham is the most famous paleoichthyologist—someone who studies extinct fish and their evolution—in the world, and I get to work with him for a month. Of course, being a paleoichthyologist makes him less of a celebrity than, like, a vaguely Instagram-famous cat, but still.
And, okay, fine. Doing this internship is about more than just working with Dr. Graham. I lost myself this past semester; the person I was for the first eighteen years of my life disappeared.
From the moment I started dating Sadie, she became my single focus.
But that’s done now. I’ve decided that I won’t be dating anyone ever again. Relatedly, I’m also never having sex again, because sex ruins everything. I will do neither. I’ll be the Jewish version of a nun.
Working in the lab will be perfect. I can focus on dead fish. Dead fish can’t break your heart. They can only teach you about the world and what it means to exist in it. Also, they’ve been extinct for millions of years, and in that way they’re extremely lucky.
And up until my mom pulled off the snow-covered highway, I was confident that my time in DC would be uneventful. The perfect follow-up to my semester with Sadie.
But now we’re staring death in the face.
And death is staring back, wearing a red beanie.
I’m about to be a murderer.
The car barrels toward the girl, and her neutral expression flips in an instant to terror.
My mom finally sees her and frantically tries to slam on the brakes. She pumps them over and over, but between the snow and ice, the car won’t stop.
Then there’s the thud.
The bump.
Not a hard bump, but still. A bump.
We bumped a person with our car.
Beanie girl disappears from view and I hold my breath, certain she’s dead. My mom and I are both frozen to our seats.
And then she stands up in front of the car, brushes herself off, and starts screaming.
I can’t quite make out all of what she says through the sturdy Subaru walls, but it sounds a lot like, “What the fuck are you doing?” and “Are you shitting me?” and “I could’ve died,” etc.
She slams her fists against the hood, yelling and yelling and yelling.
I’m transfixed.
She’s probably around my age, with big eyes and semitranslucent white skin that seems to glow in the light of the high beams. The whole scene is oddly . . . beautiful?
I shake the thought out of my head as my mom opens her door to check on our victim.
But as she steps out, the person yells, “What the fuck?” and slams her fist against the hood again. “Stay in the fucking car!”
So my mom closes the door.
The girl stomps away, but before she gets too far, she turns back to us. Then she looks me directly in the eye and flips me off.
My mom and I are silent for a moment.
“Well,” she says, clutching the wheel, “I hope not everyone in DC is like her.”
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