The In-Betweeners

I always liked history, but not for the history aspect of it. I liked history because I liked reading about those people who were more fucked up than I was. I liked history because I liked the odd facts. Did you know that at the age of twelve, Martin Luther King became depressed and tried to commit suicide twice by jumping out a second story window? It always comforted me to think that even this great man, Martin Luther King Jr., had his moments of weakness.

But have you ever noticed how history leaves many gaps that may never be filled? Whenever my teacher would lecture us in history class, it would always be about one thing that person did in history and then skip ahead ten years to the next important thing they did. I always wondered what happened in those ten years though. What was that person like? What did they do when they weren’t busy making history? Did they have a family? Did they love their wife, of were they secretly having an affair with another woman? Were they really as ruthless as the textbook says, or were they just trying to do their job?

Why did nobody wonder about those between moments?

To me, it’s not the important moments that define a person, it’s the between moments. A nerd isn’t a nerd because he got a perfect score on the hardest test. That nerd is a nerd because he spent hours upon hours studying. That nerd is a nerd because he gets nervous and awkward around girls. A bitch isn’t a bitch because of that one moment when she stood in front of the entire school and spilled “that other girl’s” deepest, darkest secrets. That girl is a bitch because of all those moments she spent plotting her schemes to get back at those other bitches. That girl is a bitch because of what she does in those between moments. Because everybody has those stand-out moments where they do something note-worthy; everybody has those nerdy moments where they were the only person in class to pass a test, or those bitchy moments where they made fun of somebody else for the clothes they wear.

I remember one of my between moments. It’s my favorite, and to me it shouldn’t even count as a between moment, it was an important moment to me at the time, though to anyone else I suppose it wouldn’t really matter.

Shane and I were sitting at lunch, alone save for each other’s company as usual. I was eating chicken nuggets and corn, or rather, what the school lunch ladies called chicken nuggets and corn. The chicken was suspiciously rubbery and the corn was tinted a nasty green color, floating happily in a liquid I hadn’t dared to ask about in the corner of my tray. Shane of course had brought lunch. Her mother would never in a million years have allowed her to eat something from the school menu. Instead her mother had packed her grilled chicken, sweet peppers in a zip-lock baggie, a protein bar, and a chilled water bottle.

“Trade you for a chicken nugget?” she said, offering me a sweet pepper.

I wrinkled my nose, “You can have both.”

She shrugged, her expression still void of any real emotion, and took the proffered Styrofoam tray and began to eat the rubbery chicken nuggets. The thing about Shane is that her mom was a personal trainer, which meant no junk food in the house, ever. I guess she would take whatever she could get.

I remember how we sat there in silence for a while. I can’t pretend that I know what Shane was thinking at that moment. But I can tell you what I was thinking. I can tell you that at that moment I was thinking that I had a best friend that wasn’t really a best friend. I did not know her favorite color. I did not know her middle name. I had never been to her house. We didn’t hang out together on weekends. But at the same time we were best friends because we had a vague understanding of each other. I understood that she didn’t care and didn’t want to care, and she understood that I didn’t want to be me. It was easy, easy because I loved her and she loved me, as friends of course, but it was a relationship in the loosest sense of the word and the most non-committal way possible.

She looked up at me then, as I thought about her, and she looked at me with her head cocked slightly to the side, her wide hazel eyes gazing into my own brown ones, and one perfectly shaped eyebrow raised slightly higher than the other, and it was almost in that moment that we were thinking the same thing.

I smiled at her.

She did not smile back.

That moment hung in the air for what seemed like an eternity. And then, finally, she opened her mouth, and for one split second I thought she was going to smile back at me, I thought she was going to return the small gesture.

But instead, “You have a nice smile, James.”