You by Caroline Kepnes
And now you’re a mouse, Beck.
“It’s not strong like you, Danny.” He’s very serious now. “That mouse is tiny. You’ve got arms, hands. You have dexterity.”
You only have a pussy and I agree with him.
“You can reach the doorknob, Dan. You can lay down traps.”
Traps.
“You know, Danny, life’s a bitch and sometimes it gets dark in your house.”
He points to his head and I nod. It does get pretty dark in here.
“And that’s when the mice come.”
You came into my store and started this thing, us.
“Sometimes it gets so dark that all you can do is listen to that fucking mouse scramble around and eat your food and shit on your floor and it’s so dark that you can’t see the doorknob,” he goes on. “You forget there is a doorknob and what we do in here is we turn on the lights, Danny.”
“Right.”
“We set the traps, Danny.”
“Right,” I say, louder than before.
“And we open the door and we get the broom and we shoo that mouse out of there,” he says and he punches the air. “And sometimes, we don’t even need to do that because sometimes, we kill that mouse.”
Not this time.
“And it doesn’t happen in a heartbeat. I’m not gonna lie, Danny. But it’s doable.”
“You ever work in construction?” I ask. Most guys in our neighborhood did, at some point, and I like the idea of Nicky and I having stuff in common, being equals.
“Couple of summers back in the day,” he answers, and I was right. “You?”
“Couple of summers back in the day,” I say, too eager. What a loser and a copycat but Nicky smiles and I think of the past few weeks and the nights I spend on the floor against the wall with your panties in my hands, staring at the hole in the wall that I made because of you and covered because of you. “Yeah, Doctor . . .”
He shakes his head and I laugh. “I mean, Nicky. I need to find the doorknob.”
“You’re gonna find it. And if the house/mouse concept doesn’t work for you, you can also think of the video as a zit. You can pop it and it’s gone. Forever, no scars, if you take care of your skin.”
You are not a zit, you are a mouse, and I speak. “I thought you weren’t supposed to pop zits.”
“That’s bullshit,” he says and he looks at the clock. “So. Do you like Thursdays?”
AFTERWARD, when I walk down the street, I feel like a changed person, Beck. Fifty minutes with Nicky and it’s like I have a new set of eyes. The world looks different to me, like I put on 3-D glasses or smoked a joint or fucked the shit out of you. I feel high but straight and I head for the park where I watch the “Sea of Love” video for the first time in a long time. The girl in the video is kind of cute with the Bowie blond hair and therapy is working out already. I mean, watching this offbeat, trippy video makes me happy and I haven’t been happy in a while. And the best part is, that I’m not afraid anymore. You’re not sleeping with Nicky. You’re just experiencing transference. I know about it from The Prince of Tides. It happens. Nicky has a master’s and Nicky is the man and he’d never break the doctor-patient dynamic. It applies, even though he’s not a real doctor.
I walk to the subway and then walk down the stairs. I like life, Beck. I feel all this new patience. I can wait for you to call me. I am strong enough to give you time. I forgot to check your e-mail and your phone is heavier than it was this morning. I write to myself even though he didn’t tell me to:
Dear Joe, You have a mouse in your house and when she’s ready, you will kiss her and she will turn into the girl of your dreams. Be patient. Be open. Best, Dan Fox
I haven’t felt this close to you in two weeks. I love therapy, I do.
35
AT my next session, I told Nicky about how I feel high when I leave his beige office. He said my reaction is common—I’m normal!—and it’s all about a new perspective.
“I have a place upstate,” he said. “I get out there into the woods every couple of weeks. Not because of the fresh air, but because of the fresh perspective.”
In my third session, we talk all about the video (you) and Nicky tells me about what he calls the cat strategy. “I used to have this neighbor who rented her cat out. You know why?”
“To help depressed people?” I ask. Wrong.
“If anyone in the neighborhood had a mouse problem, Mrs. Robinson would lend her cat for a day or two,” he says. “And, Danny, the thing about mice, if they so much as smell a cat, they’re out of there.”
“So if I started watching something else, I’d stop watching the video.”
He nods. We don’t talk. Sometimes that happens in here, an abrupt silence. Nicky says it’s normal; you have to process things. I process the idea of a life without you. I’d date other girls (unimaginable) and go on walks and maybe I’d find people to play basketball with or sit in a dark bar watching the news and fall asleep in my bed without your phone in my hand and wake up without our phone pressing into my flesh. My hands hurt from obsessively checking your e-mail; maybe it would be nice to have fingers that don’t sting. I don’t know what it would be like to be here without you inside of me, Beck. I do know that you are a lot to handle. I am tired.
Nicky can sense when I’m done processing. He readjusts in his chair. “Give it a shot this week,” he says. “Journal on it and let me know how it goes.”
I like having homework and I leave his office and find that the world is full of women. So maybe I do want to find out about life without you. I’d almost forgotten about girls. They’re everywhere, Beck, on the subway platform there are college girls in tight jeans with their heads buried in Kindles and round old chicks hanging on to reusable bags of vegetables and middle-aged housewives heaving with raggedy bags from Macy’s and Forever 21, and there’s a hot blond chick who’s so little she makes you seem like a jolly green giant and she’s in scrubs and she looks freshly scrubbed and I’m totally fucking staring and she smiles. Game on.
“Do I know you?” she says and she has a little bit of an accent, Long Island City, I think.
“No,” I say and she walks toward me, not away from me and she smells like ham sandwiches and rubbing alcohol. I like her tits.
“You don’t know me at all?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Then why the fuck are you staring at me?”
“I don’t know,” I say and I wonder what Nicky would say. “I guess I must just like staring at you.”
The train screeches to a stop and her electric green beady little eyes home in on me and random women go onto the subway as random women get off and the two of us lock eyes like animals in heat. She has thin eyebrows and long painted fingernails, nothing like yours, which is good. I could never love this girl. But I sure can practice on her.
She starts, “Who kicked your ass?”
“I had an accident.”
“You had an accident,” she sneers. “That’s a good one.”
“I got jumped.”
“So you just fucking lie about it before you even know my name?”
“I guess I just felt like lying.” And I am good at this and Nicky would be impressed.
“Well, what if I don’t go out with liars?”
“Then it sucks to be you.”
“What the fuck is happening right now?”
“You know, who cares?” I say and I am on like Donkey Kong. “If this conversation were happening in a dark bar and we were both shitfaced it would be perfectly normal.”
Her name is Karen Minty and she bites her glossy lip and gets in my face. “And if your grandmother had balls she’d be your grandfather.”
Karen Minty decides right there that she’s going to have sex with me and I know it. She is so much easier to read than you are and I couldn’t ask for a better cat and it starts with an obligatory drink at some fuckface bar packed with NYU kids who drink American beer out of buckets. You’d hate it here but she
“Do you know how I know about this drink? Leonardo DiCaprio drinks these. It’s true.”
“Do you know why food in hospitals sucks my ass? Because they do want you to die. It’s true, Joey. It’s true. It’s fucking cheaper and not as many people have to work doubles if you got more empty beds.”
“Do you know that I had this feeling like I was gonna meet someone tonight? I shouldn’t be fucking saying this, fucking Greyhounds, but, Joe, I had this fucking feeling. And then you were staring at me.” She burps. “That needs to come off, Joe.”
“My shirt?”
“That bandage on your hand.”
I forgot it was there. Look what you did to me. It started when I burnt my hand in the candle. Then the healing was interrupted because I picked at the scab because of what you did to me. Then Curtis beat me up while I was rushing to get ready to go see you. And then of course I crashed my car while I was looking for you. I see a pattern here and Nicky says life is all about patterns and now Karen Minty grabs my hand like it belongs to her. Karen Minty is fucking strong, and she whispers in my ear, “Save your energy, Joey. You’re gonna need it.”
She yanks the bandage off my hand and before I can wince, she kisses me. As it turns out, Karen Minty’s lips are strong too. My hand doesn’t hurt anymore.
By the time we get on a train I don’t think either of us knows which way the train is going. It’s a miracle that the train is empty, not even the random bum or gangster or ho. It’s a miracle that Karen Minty licks the place on my face where Curtis fucked me up and her tongue is sharper than yours and I fucking tear off her scrubs—she’s wearing a thong—and she grabs at me and we go at it on the fucking subway at four in the morning and when Karen Minty cums, she screams—yeah Joe yeah I’m yours cum now NOW—and she digs her claws into my back and her eyes roll around in her head and when she finishes, her legs are still wrapped around me, vibrating. I hold on to her tight, wishing she were you. She sticks that pointy tongue down my throat and she takes it back and she looks at me.
“I love you,” she says and what have I done and she bursts out laughing and hops off of me and wraps herself in my coat. “Your face, Joey, omigod. You should see your fucking face right now, I’m just fucking with you.”
“I know,” I say. And I will not worry; most girls go fucking insane for a few minutes after they fuck. That’s just the way it is.
She is defensive. “Obviously, I don’t even know you.”
“I know,” I say and she curls into me, not away from me and I look at us in the window. We come and go as the lights flicker in the tunnel and I will sleep tonight for the first time in a long time and Karen Minty will make me an egg sandwich and give me a blow job in the morning. I can just tell, something about those Greyhounds, something about that mouth. She does love me.
I am the best patient ever because already, I have found a stray cat.
THE next day, I get to the shop and I’m hungover as all fuck and full of an egg sandwich that was a bad idea. Karen Minty meant well, but Karen Minty was probably still too drunk to cook. I told her it was a nice time. She told me she’d come by the shop. I didn’t encourage her, Beck. And now I have Ethan up my ass—he’s early, again—and he wants to know if I’m sick.
“Do you have a cold, Joe? Or did you just have too much sauce?”
Only Ethan calls it sauce and I unlock the door and if I were a therapist like Nicky I wouldn’t have to deal with Ethan. I send him to Fiction to find staff picks and I turn on the music. Karma is a bitch. The first song that comes on is “You Are Too Beautiful” from Hannah and Her Sisters. I slam it off. Suddenly it hits me. I cheated on you, I cheated on us.
My head pounds. The doorbell chimes and every noise hurts, especially the one that comes now, the girl I just banged, Karen Fucking Minty. I want to slit my wrists.
But at the same time, I’m dying for coffee and she’s holding two hot cups—Starbucks, surprising—and she shrugs. “I didn’t know how you guys take ’em so I just got fucking everything.”
She plants a heavy paper bag on the counter. Ethan comes bounding to the front of the shop and she is scary friendly to him right off the bat. “You must be Ethan, right? Joe told me all about you.”
How drunk was I last night? Ethan can’t contain his joy at the idea of me telling some chick about him and he practically drools all over Karen Minty. She wastes no time making herself at home and she looks at me. “So, how do you take coffee, Joe?”
I tell her I’m fine and she rolls her eyes and winks at me and calls, “Hey, Ethan?”
He trips over himself running back. Only Ethan. And he tells her that I’m black, two sugars and he’s “Cream and Stevia. Or Truvía. Or Splenda. And if they don’t have any of that the real sugar in the brown packets. But never Equal!”
All the while, Karen is looking deep into my eyes and she thinks she’s gonna bring me coffee for the rest of her life. I love you, not her and oh fuck she’s one of those girls. She smiles at me hard and winks. “Thanks, Ethan.”
And there’s no way around it. I didn’t just pet this cat. I adopted it.
36
BEING with Karen is shockingly effective, at least in the sense that you’re farther and farther away from me. I try to see the good in it: I get to practice being a boyfriend, and that’s good for us. But I do feel bad when I’m caressing her ass in bed and folding her thongs at the Laundromat and sending her mother a handwritten thank-you note after Sunday dinner. It’s wrong of me to betray you. But, know this, Beck: Every day I find a way to visit the pictures of you in my phone. I’m faithful. Seven weeks into life with Karen Minty and eleven weeks into therapy and Nicky thinks I’m making good progress. I’m not as depressed anymore. I read your e-mail and I know you’re still doing your thing—no booze, no shopping—and now that I’m seeing Dr. Nicky, I totally get why he makes you want to focus.
“You look so much happier than you were the day you started in here, Danny.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I feel happier.”
“And things are good with Karen?”
“Things are great with Karen,” I say and they are, technically. Nicky laughed when I first told him about her. He said a girl is a much more effective cat than another YouTube video. He’s right.
“I know that look, Danny.” He grins. “After I met my wife, I don’t think I stopped smiling for two years.”
I blurt, “Oh, we’re not gonna get married, Nicky.”
He gets that know-it-all look and I go further. “I just mean, she’s not it for me.”
He pushes. “Now you don’t look so happy. Are you afraid to get married?”
“Not at all.” And it’s true. I’d marry you in a heartbeat.
“So what’s wrong with Karen, Danny?”
She’s not you. “She’s just . . . nothing.”
“She’s nothing,” he says and he raises his eyebrows. “Ouch.”
I groan. “I meant that nothing is wrong with her.”
“Regardless,” he says and that’s how I know our time is up. “I got some homework for you. I want a list of ten things you like about Karen. The cat helps the mouse stay away. And remember. Thinking about the cat is better than thinking about the mouse.”
“Okay, Doc,” I say and the “Doc” thing is our running joke, you know, because he’s not a doctor. I try to do my homework on the ride home, but I just keep thinking about you.
I’m still trying a few days later as I sit on the couch watching Karen Minty’s favorite show, The King of Queens. She laughs at a joke that wouldn’t make you smile and I love you because you don’t laugh easily. She picks her thong out of her ass and I love you for your healthy cotton panties.
She moans. “I fucking love Ke
“He’s good,” I lie. I love you because you don’t love Kevin James and if you laughed at one of his jokes, you still wouldn’t love him.
A Burger King commercial comes on—Karen Minty fucking loves commercials—and she flips the bird at the TV. “Bite me, BK. BK fries suck, right, Joe?”
I play along and laugh but I love you because we could be married a hundred years and you’d never ask me what I think about BK fries because you’d never say BK and if you were talking about French fries, there would be more to it than fries. They would have significance. There would be a story there. You’re an onion and Karen’s a Maraschino cherry and I love you because onions are more complicated than cherries. I’m doomed.
I almost forgot that Karen Minty’s head is on my lap and she peers up at me. “Babe, you all right?”
“Yeah.” And I run my hand through her hair the way she likes. “I’m just thinking about my homework.”
Karen doesn’t approve. “I swear, Joe, I think that shit’s a waste of money.”
“I know you do.”
“At the hospital, all the fuckups are shrinks. Every one of them, they’re fucking cheaters and liars and they’re crazier than their patients.”
“Nicky’s not like that,” I say.
She huffs. “Like fuck he’s not. They’re cheaters and liars, Joe, cheaters and liars.”
You never repeat yourself because you’re creative and Karen is not and she pinches my nipple. “Joe, look at me.”
I look at her. “Watch it, miss.”
“What do you talk about in there anyway? I mean you’re perfect, Joey.”
“Nobody’s perfect.” I sound like a teacher. “And I get a little OCD.”
“Yeah.” Karen Minty laughs. “You are OCD . . . on my pussy.”
You would never say anything so crass and I pet Karen Minty and watch Kevin James and I miss you so much I feel sick. Suddenly, I have to go. I stand up.
“Whoa, where’s the fire?” She hugs my seat cushion, she’s too needy.