Unteachable

by Leah Raeder

My name’s Maise, by the way. Maise O’Malley. Yeah, I’m Irish as hell. But you probably knew that from the drinking, right?

I’m not going to do the whole roller-coaster/falling-in-love metaphor. I didn’t fall in love with him up there. Maybe I fell in love with the idea of love, but I’m a teenage girl.

You can call it love, or you can call it free fall. They’re pretty much the same thing.

cheekbones high and chiseled, straight patrician nose, tall forehead, boyishly handsome—but it was the expression that made him beautiful.

“I see the lights every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one’s letting me in on the secret.”

There are moments, when you’re getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too.

It feels like meeting a stranger you’ve known ...

“Why’d you get on the roller coaster?” I said. A little comma formed in the corner of his mouth, a half smile. “I’m starting a new job soon, and . . . I’m terrified, honestly. I thought that if I f...

He drove a Chevy Monte Carlo built

Thanks, Dad, for leaving a huge void in my life that Freud says has to be filled with dick.

“I’m not trying to seduce you,”

“You are so beautiful. God, I just want to touch you.”

the maroon Monte Carlo with the sad-eyed pony sitting on the dashboard, its coat shining sleekly in the sun.

At the beginning, you’re grateful to simply be near them. To look. To bask. It’s a gift fallen from heaven, accidentally nudged off a golden table, still glimmering with stardust.

The Constellations, “Right Where I Belong.”

Wish I was there, he said. Me too, I answered.

He looked at all of me, my fresh teenage skin, my adult certainty, my old soul. No one had ever looked at me so completely. No one had ever seen me as such a whole, rounded person.

He was fourteen when I was born.

“I can’t hold on to you. You’re like that shooting star. Just a trail of fire in my hands.”

I haven’t been fair to you, and I didn’t realize how much stress I’ve been putting you under. Maybe I didn’t want to realize it. You deserve better than this. You deserve better than being Harriet the fucking Spy. Sorry if this sounds dramatic—this isn’t a breakup letter.

This is me saying I’m going to do better. I want you to be happy, Maise. You mean more to me than you know. Seeing you miserable and drunk breaks my heart. I want to make you as happy as you were that first night when we got off that crazy death ride together. I want you to be that free again.

You’ve done something to me, too. I can’t get enough of you. “I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed and sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.” And before you think that’s cheesy, that’s Sylvia Plath. Google her, young Padawan.

Okay, I should probably go. I don’t want to stop, though. I can’t stop with you. Come with me to St. Louis. Let’s find happiness.

“I like that you’re kind of fucked-up, because I’m kind of fucked-up.”

That’s another thing about lies: if you convince yourself they’re true, they become true. A lie is a discrepancy of belief, not fact.

And that made my heart ache, too—the thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together.

“Now I know,” he said, touching me again, “why I was drawn to you. We have the same darkness inside.” “Our fucked-up parents?” “Our lost childhood.”

“What do you want?” “All of you.”

don’t know where all of me is right now,”

“Statistically,” I said, “we’re doomed, you know.” “Statistically, everyone is doomed.”

“What are you doing to me?” he said, his voice far away. “This is all I think about. I’m obsessed.”

I thought maybe this would remind you. That this could hold you when I couldn’t.”

It was a silver Claddagh ring: two hands clasping a heart with a crown atop it.

like you,” I said, “as a friend. And I kind of like flirting with you, too, but I like flirting with everyone. That’s who I am. You get it, right? Because that stuff about filming me—it weirds me out. I can’t be your manic pixie dream girl. I can’t be the girl who teaches you how to open your heart and embrace life and all that bullshit, because I’m

trying to figure out how to do that myself. I need a manic pixie dream boy of my own.”

Cathedral Basilica.

I want to keep you. I want to hold on and never let you go.”

I guess I’m trying to say what I couldn’t say that night. You can call it love, or you can call it free fall. They’re pretty much the same thing. And I love you.

You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you’ll lose it someday.