Monophobia

by Aquaman

Chapter 8: Instead of Beating

Some people like to say that bravery isn’t the absence of fear, but acting anyway in spite of it. It’s a nice thought. And like a lot of nice thoughts, it’s also total horseshit.

Because the thing is, fear does go absent when you do something brave. For example, my fear vanished completely last night once I started ignoring it, then stayed absent while I walked back to my dorm with Woody and Crescent gassing me up the whole way, then just sort of hung out nearby as I fell asleep with visions of dead presidents dancing in my head. When my phone alarm went off eight hours later, I even got to spend a few seconds all by myself lying nice and warm and brave under my sheets, thinking something along the lines of, “Man, this is nice. Thanks for being cool last night, fear.”

And then my fear said something back like, “No problem, boss. What was it you actually did last night, again?” At which point I thought about last night, remembered the little flourish I did with my hand as I flipped over the Seven of Hearts, and bolted upright in bed as I answered my fear aloud.

“Oh shit!” is what I think I said first. “Oh my God, fuck!” was my followup remark.

And that’s why that old saying is horseshit. Because once you’re done spiting your fear and almost forget you ever felt it to begin with, it’ll come storming back all at once, kick you in the balls, and make up for every second of attention you didn’t give it before. And you know what? If you ask me right now, it isn’t fucking worth it.

Because right now my hands are clammy against my face and my lungs feel like shriveled little raisins in my chest, and I’m sweating and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane over what I actually did last night, which was put five hundred real dollars on a fucking bluff! If I’d misread Al at all, if even the smallest slightest thing had gone differently, I’d be flat broke right now and friendless and probably infamous all over campus as the dumbass freshman who pretended to be a fucking wizard during a fucking fraternity poker game.

God, that could’ve gone so wrong in so many ways. It should’ve gone wrong in all of them at once. And remembering that it somehow impossibly didn’t just gets my heart pounding faster and my ears ringing louder, until I have to grab my pillow and squeeze it tight against my chest just to keep from screaming.

Or… screaming again, I guess. I definitely yelled out loud a minute ago, if the dazed and concerned look Bit’s giving me across our room is anything to go by.

“Sorry,” I tell him, letting my pillow drop into my lap and gritting my teeth as a calming-the-fuck-down backup plan. It doesn’t feel like it’s working, but I’ll give it a chance to turn things around. Hardly any crazier than smooth-talking a senior into folding a full house with five hundred dollars on the table, you FUCKING LUNATIC.

“Did you have a nightmare?” he asks.

I can’t stop myself from laughing — nervously, awkwardly, pitched like a toddler with his hand caught in a cookie-jar-baited bear trap. “Actually, no,” is my breathless reply. “That’s the scary part.”

Which doesn’t make any sense, and fair enough, Bit doesn’t bother pretending it does. “Huh,” he intones. “Well…”

“Yeah. Sorry. I promise I’m done screaming. Go back to sleep.”

And after staring blankly at me for a couple seconds, he actually does — or at least, he flops back down onto his pillow, facing away from me with his comforter up to his neck. Either way, I’m quasi-alone again, and despite what I just said, I can feel more swears and shouts bulging in the back of my throat. So rather than bothering Bit again, I scramble out of bed, slip on pants and shoes as I grab my phone and keys, and speedwalk out the door and down the hall towards the bathroom. Maybe if I splash water on my face like people do in the movies, it’ll keep my heart from popping like an overfilled meat balloon.

Fair enough to the movies this time: the sink-water-on-the-face thing does help a bit. But in the end, it only buys me half a minute of relative calm — and then my phone starts buzzing in my pocket, and goosebumps roll through me again. Who the hell is calling me at whatever time it is, and how could it possibly be about anything good?

Holding my breath, I pull my phone out and answer the call, and Woody’s face fills the screen. He looks like he just woke up too — and unlike me, he looks absolutely psyched about it.

“Dude,” he gushes, not even waiting for a “hello” from my end. “Sorry, it’s early, but holy shit, man! I still can’t believe that actually happened last night!”

“Yep,” I groan, bracing myself against the sink with my free hand. “And if I ever try to do something like that again, I need you to kill me. On the spot, no questions.”

“Fuck that, Button, you were incredible! I mean, look at me!” He holds his free hand up next to his face, so I can see that it’s shaking the tiniest bit. I guess he hasn’t noticed how much all of me is shaking right now too. “I’m still hyped about it, and I was just watching!”

Woody’s excitement is infectious even over the phone. That, or I’m just ramping up for, what, my third panic attack of the last five minutes? Either way, I don’t need to ruin the moment for him, nor do I get the chance to.

“Okay, well, anyway, that’s not why I called,” Woody continues. “What’s your class schedule like today?”

“Uh…” I shut my eyes and try to remember what I actually set my alarm for. “Data Management in like an hour, then Microecon at two and my freshman seminar after that. Philosophy of Technology.”

“What kinds of philosophies do people have about technology?”

“Psychotic ones, mostly. You wanna get lunch or something?”

“No, I…” He blinks and realizes he answered the wrong question. “Well, yeah, sure, let’s do lunch, but also, you wanna hang out later? I’ve got Crescent and a couple other guys coming over, we’re just gonna play some Smash and pregame for rush tonight. You in?”

Now it’s my turn to blink aimlessly and process what I actually heard rather than whatever I was expecting. I’m being invited to hang out. I haven’t been invited to hang out with other guys my age in… ever.

And instead of being excited about it, I feel like I want to start screaming again.

“Um…” I say after a second. “I mean, I’d like to, I just…”

Just what? I don’t have anything else going on. I have no reason to say no and every reason to say yes. It’d be fun. It’d make Woody like me more.

“I have so much stuff to catch up on,” I tell my friend. “I’ve missed a lot of classes this week. ‘Cause… hangovers, y’know?”

I’m lying. I’m obviously lying — and Woody’s buying it.

“Yeah, I feel that,” he says with a sympathetic sigh. “Feels like we’ve been rushing for a month already. You’ll be out tonight, though, yeah?” He cracks a smile. “With your DM face on?”

“Yep,” I weakly reply. “It’s never off.”

“Nice,” Woody chuckles. “See you later, Poker Wizard.”

And then my phone screen goes dark as he ends the call. Poker Wizard. That’s what he thinks of me — who all of KNZ thinks I am now. I pocket my phone and brace both hands on the sink, eyes squeezed shut and forehead pressed against the grungy mirror in front of me.

As if the panic attacks weren’t enough, now I know they’re not the end of this either. If I’d lost that hand last night, I’d be a loser in everyone’s eyes, and the only reason I’m not is because I somehow faked my way into winning. The second I drop that act, the moment I let anyone see past my daredevil card-shark facade, I’m right back to square one. Buried beneath it, actually, since Woody will probably drop me like a bad hand too.

Maybe I’m being paranoid. Maybe Woody likes me because of who I was before last night, not in spite of it. Or maybe fear is spiteful and patient, and so is contempt. Maybe this’ll all end with Woody and Source and everybody I’ve met this semester staring and laughing at me, disgusted at what a giant fucking dork I always was and embarassed that it took them so long to notice.

“Who are you kidding?” I mutter down into the sink. “Who the fuck…”

My phone buzzes in my pocket — a text this time, not a call. Another wave of adrenaline rolls through me when I see who it’s from.

Morning, party animal! How’d rush go last night?

I spend a few seconds staring at the message, then past my blurry phone at the off-white tiles beneath the sink. I don’t have to answer Sweetie Belle. I don’t have to be honest. I could just turn off my phone and go back to my room and hide under my bedsheets until I convince myself this week was just a long, weird nightmare like Bit thought. I could just give up. I could do what I’ve always done when things got scary and I didn’t know how to handle them.

But I want to handle this. I’ve learned what handling it looks and sounds and feels like, and I want more. And if I’ve faked it this far, maybe I can keep it up a bit longer. At least until the end of rush, when I’ll know once and for all where I actually stand — with KNZ, Sweetie Belle, everyone everywhere.

And in the meantime, I can’t stay in this bathroom all day agonizing over it. I have classes to go to, and a message to answer. I tap on Sweetie Belle’s message notification and type back:

It’s kind of a long story.

Then, before I can think better of it:

Tell you over coffee? I’ll buy this time.

Her reply comes quickly:

Make it breakfast and I’m in. I want a donut too. >:)

I send her a thumbs-up emoji and pocket my phone. Time to put my DM face on again. At least there’s one definite upside to last night: I have money now to put where my mouth has gone.

The plans I just made mean I’ve lost my window for a morning shower, so I settle for some more water splashed on my face and swished around in my mouth. Then I jog back down the hall towards my dorm so I can finish getting dressed and grab my backpack. On my way back out after doing both, Bit speaks up again — still in bed, sitting up and staring at me with an expression I can’t read in the dim mid-morning light.

“How did you start going out?”

His tone is just as unreadable as his face. Does he think I know something he doesn’t? Does he remember how much of a shut-in I was for the whole first semester, and he’s trying to call every bluff I’ve made this week at once? I don’t have the energy or the desire to dig the meaning out of Bit’s jarring, contextless question, just like most of the other ones he’s blurted out over the past few months.

“What do you mean?” I ask, because I can’t just ignore him no matter how much I secretly want to.

“Like…” It takes him a couple seconds to find what I guess, to him, are the right words. “You didn’t go out and do stuff before. And now you do. So… how did you start?”

Lying, I want to tell him. I just keep lying and pretending I’m somebody I’m not, and somehow it keeps working.

But I have somewhere to be, and I still can’t tell whether Bit’s curious or judgemental or just adding data to his internal directory on how human speech works. So total honesty’s off the table, and selective truth is better than totally lying.

“I just… went out,” I say. “Met somebody in class and gave it a shot, I guess.”

“Oh.”

And that’s that. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Bit lies back down in bed, and I give him an unseen wave as I head out. Another upside to last night: no matter how awkward things might’ve been if I’d lost that hand, at least they weren’t as rough in reality as trying to talk to my roommate is every day. I guess that’s a good thing — or at least, the absence of a bad one.

And hey, maybe breakfast with Sweetie Belle won’t be so bad either. Maybe she’ll be as impressed with me as Woody is. All I have to do is tell the story well, just like I did last night. I can do that, right?

===

“... and then they just let me keep the money like it wasn’t a big deal at all, but it was, it’s a huge fucking deal, and now I probably have to keep acting like that if I want a bid, which I don’t even know if I want except that Woody wants one and he’s like my only guy friend, and it’s insane. It’s just…”

I run out of breath much later than I should have, and I have to bite my lip to keep from rambling even more once my lungs refill. Across the table from me, Sweetie Belle’s chewing on her own lip — in her case, to keep from laughing.

“Sorry,” I mumble, staring down at my untouched donut. “I shouldn’t have… sorry.”

“Okay, so… let me see if I understand this,” Sweetie Belle says, her face contorting with each word like she’s trying not to giggle or smile. “You were playing fake poker and having a good time, Alkaline decided to be a dick for no reason, you kicked him in the metaphorical dick and took two hundred dollars off him on top of that… and you’re sorry?”

“I just meant I was kind of rambling. I was sorry about that.”

Finally, she loses her internal battle and lets a single short snort slip out — and for the first time, I realize she wasn’t going to laugh at me. “God, please don’t be, that’s amazing,” she says. As she lifts her coffee cup to her mouth, she mutters something else into its lid: “Deserved it too.”

“What, Alkaline did?” I ask, just before a couple dots connect in my head. “You know him?”

Her first reaction is half-shrug, half-eyeroll. “I know of him,” she says. “Enough to know he had something like that coming. Trust me, if that all really happened, it was a public service.” She takes a sip of coffee, then makes a hand gesture like she wants to say something else, and does say it once she swallows. “Not that I don’t believe you. It’s just… so perfect.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “Too perfect.”

Sweetie Belle squints at me, and I bite my lip again. That pretty nails the coffin shut on telling the story well — but I’ve already told her everything I couldn’t bring myself to tell Woody, and it only takes a few seconds for the silence to spur me into spilling more.

“I just… it shouldn’t have worked,” I say, staring down at my thumb digging into the opposite hand’s knuckles in my lap. “And even though it did, I can’t stop thinking about how bad it would’ve been if it didn’t. Which is stupid, I know, because it didn’t go badly, but –”

“No it’s not.”

I blink as Sweetie Belle cuts me off, and I lean back in my seat as she leans forward a bit. “That’s not stupid,” she continues. “That was a huge risk you took. It’d be stupid if you weren’t scared.”

“Yeah, but I still shouldn’t obsess over it like this,” I try to argue — but when I put the thoughts in my head into words Sweetie Belle can hear, they sound hollow and meaningless, like they’re the real stupid things in this exchange. Maybe they are. Talking to her about it sure makes me feel that way, enough that some of the panic that’s been rolling through me all morning is finally bleeding out of me.

“Button, everybody obsesses over stuff that could’ve happened and didn’t.” She pauses a moment, then smirks to herself. “Including Alkaline, actually. But that’s a whole other story. And not a casual-breakfast one either.”

Everything about what she just cryptically said makes me want to press her for details, but I bite back the urge by biting into my donut. If she wanted to gossip about Al, she would. She’s always been the strong and not-silent type, and I’ve always been the opposite in both regards — except for the past few days. I guess that means I’ve changed a lot since we were kids.

“You know, you’re exactly the same now as you were when we were kids,” Sweetie Belle says suddenly.

I manage to swallow my donut bite without choking, but that’s about all I can offer in the way of a response. Sweetie seems to figure as much from what must be a baffled look on my face. “I’m serious,” she goes on. “The way you can spin a story out of anything, and you just find your way through it as you go. And how you’re so quiet and thoughtful until you’re excited about something, and then you talk a mile a minute. It’s…”

She stops herself before she says whatever it is. A dozen possibilities flow through my head, and every one of them brings heat to my cheeks and sends a fluttering, tingling spark through my chest.

“You’re just so hard on yourself,” Sweetie Belle says. “And I don’t get it.”

Why wouldn’t I be hard on myself? I want to reply — and again, the thought feels muffled, like it’s an echo from a voice that isn’t quite my own. Maybe she’s got a point. I’ve been taking huge risks all week and been scared out of my mind about all of them, but I stuck it out anyway. And maybe she’s right about that too: the old me, the one she knew when we were kids, just did stuff too.

And then some of that stuff didn’t go well. I stopped sticking it out. I let the world pass me by, and friends drift away, because…

“I don’t know, I…” I start to say. I don’t know what words I’m looking for. I’ve never looked for them like this before — never felt the urge to find them for my own sake or anyone else’s. “I got used to it, I guess. Just… knowing things were gonna go wrong. And then never actually trying, because then it might prove me right.”

I trail off, wait for her to interrupt again and remind me how much better things are now that I am trying — and she doesn’t. She just lets me keep talking, and keeps listening as I do.

“You remember that Minecraft server in elementary school?” I ask her, and from the way she smiles I can tell she does. “I think that’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been popular. Like, other people, kids my age, knew who I was and actually wanted to know more.”

“You slaved over that place,” Sweetie Belle adds, still smiling. “Built a whole town.”

“Yep. And then summer ended, and everybody went to different middle schools, and it all just… vanished. Like it’d never been there at all. And I just knew, somehow, it was my fault. That I hadn’t worked hard enough, done enough to keep people interested. To…”

I don’t want to say it aloud. After a moment, Sweetie Belle says it for me: “To keep me interested.” And then, before I can answer, she says something else: “That’s why you’re rushing, isn’t it?”

I want to lie. I want to say no, absolutely not, you didn’t just read me like a book and nail my whole sad-sack self to the wall like a torn-out page covered in hundred-point font. But what would be the point? She’s right. She already knows she is. And I’m tired of faking it — of lying to her, and to myself.

“Yeah,” I say. Then, before I can stop myself: “Is it working?”

“You mean, am I hanging out with you now because I think you’re a fuckboy frat star, instead of the kid who built Minecraft houses for everyone in our class just because he thought we might like it?”

Guess that answers that question. Maybe a few other ones too. “You guys better have liked ‘em,” I joke. “Spent the whole damn summer doing that.”

“I remember it being very popular,” she jokes back, and for a moment it’s like we’re back in elementary school, just talking like old friends, not thinking about what we say before we just say it and hear what the other thinks about it. It’s more than just honest. It’s real.

“You know it wasn’t your fault, right?” Sweetie Belle adds. Her face has hardened a little, from silly to sincere. “People leaving the server, I mean. It was just… middle school.”

“Middle school sucked.”

“Middle school sucked,” she agrees. “And I know it sucked in different ways for different people, but… it wasn’t personal. We were all hormonal little headcases. That’s not your fault.”

“Well, knowing that is one thing, and…”

“Believing it’s another. Yeah.” She sighs and stares down in her lap, working her lips like she isn’t sure whether she should let them tell this particular story. “You know why I left the server?” she finally says. “I was in the library, sixth grade, and these two older girls saw the little pickaxe keychain on my backpack, and they just went in on me. Called me a nerd, a dyke, a… I mean, fill in the blanks. Just out of nowhere.”

“Just for the keychain?”

“Far as I knew, yeah. And I tried to argue with them, tell them it was something I did with friends, make it sound better, and…” She shakes her head and trails off. I recognize the look on her face like I’d recognize my own face in the mirror. “That was all it took. I got made fun of one time, and I stopped doing something I really liked, with people I really liked, just so it might not happen again.”

“You can’t be too hard on yourself for that,” I tell her. “It wasn’t…”

She glances up, smirking — and I realize, grimacing, what rhetorical corner she just backed me into. “Wasn’t my fault?” she asks pointedly. “That other people were dicks, and I took it badly because I was just a sweet little kid?”

“Do you do this kind of thing with all your friends?” I grumble.

Her grin widens. “Only the fuckboy frat stars. Speaking of which, you think you’re gonna keep rushing? Now that your secret is out?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. What I don’t tell her is what I’m thinking: I might as well. And also, not like quitting now would look good to anybody, including and especially you. “It’s been insane, but… fun too. Even with Alkaline being a dick.”

“He might be even more of one now,” she points out.

“I can handle him,” I say — for her sake, not mine. Truth be told, I’d love it if I never had to handle, or see, or think about Al again. “He’s not worth giving up something I like.”

I look up, and Sweetie’s already looking at me, green eyes sparkling over a smile that seems sincere, satisfied — breathtaking. My mind goes blank, and my own lips curl into a grin, and the only conscious thought I have left is that I could live in this moment forever without wanting anything else.

And why shouldn’t I? Why can’t we? Her eyebrows twitch up, and the soft sounds of the cafe swarm around me and pulse through my flushing face. My brain’s screaming at me to get a grip, but another part — getting bigger and louder by the second — wants to see whether that one perfect moment might have blazed a path towards more to come.

“Guess that means you’ve got plans tonight, then,” Sweetie Belle says.

“Plans, yeah,” I agree. “Might, uh… pregame with Woody and some other guys before going over to KNZ.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want you to miss that.”

“What would I miss it for?”

“Oh, nothing big,” she says. “But you did ask me to tell you if I was gonna start singing again, and…”

Her gaze has shifted towards a bulletin board near the cafe’s entrance that’s covered in flyers promoting local events. More specifically, she’s looking at a poster on that board showing today’s date under the words “Open Mic Night.”

“You’re gonna perform?” I ask. “Tonight?”

“Well, with all that talk about doing stuff we like… only fair, right?” she says, stumbling a bit over the words. “But if you’ve got somewhere else to be…”

“I don’t,” I blurt out. “I-I mean… I’ll be there. I want to hear you sing.”

For a moment, I could swear she looks a little relieved. “I better hear you cheering, then. Especially if I suck.”

“You’re not gonna suck. I’m looking forward to it.”

“I guess I am too, then,” she says softly, before glancing at the wall clock. “Class time. I gotta go. But I’ll see you tonight. Thanks for the donut.”

“See you tonight,” I reply as she gathers her backpack and stands up. She lingers for a moment next to the table, then strides towards the door. I watch her leave, curls bobbing under the edge of the wool hat she puts on along the way, clinging for as long as I can to the warmth and comfort and I-don’t-know-what of a moment I don’t have a word for other than “perfect.”

And then the moment ends when I look at the open mic night poster and read the start time printed on it, and I remember that I actually do have somewhere else to be tonight. I pull out my phone and scroll down my messages list until I find the last one I got from Source, typing out to him:

Hey, what time does the rush event start tonight?

Thankfully, he answers fast:

10-ish. You that eager to take more money off us?

I glance up at the poster again. The show starts at nine PM and goes until eleven. Shit.

How big a deal is it if I’m a little late?

Not gonna lie, it’s not ideal.

Shit again. I guess I just have to be honest and hope my excuse works.

Sorry. I told a girl I’d come to a show she’s doing. Didn’t realize the times would conflict.

Mr. Mash, are you telling me you’re putting pussy before the bonds of brotherhood?

Shit shit shit. It feels like everyone in the cafe is staring at me. Even though I can’t see anyone doing it when I look up, my face is still burning. How am I supposed to respond to that? Is… doing that even a bad thing?

But before I can level up from overthinking to panicking, my phone buzzes again:

I’m fucking with you, man. You’re fine. But expect “consequences” when you do show up.

Why is “consequences” in quotes?

All I get back is a smiling red emoji with devil horns. I don’t even know if that’s worth a “shit” or not, but I guess I’ll find out later. For now, all I can do is get through the rest of today. And then figure out how to dress for both a show and a frat party.

One last silver lining to everything: at least I know for sure to skip the tie for both.

Author's Note: