Shock Read Free Page A

smushed-together couples with four legs and four arms and their sex organs locked in a constant erotic knot. Then something happened to blow us all apart, and now we spend our whole lives looking for our other halves. I guess some couples feel that way, but not me and Ed.
    Still, there was something in the way we were together that was so easy. It felt like home. Being with him, being his friend, filled something in me that I didn’t know was empty. And then having him become my confidant and my actual boyfriend—that made the connection so much deeper. But the best part was always having him as my friend.
    It was a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is what I just said. The closeness. The comfort. The home.
    The curse part is that once you’ve felt that comfort and it’s taken away from you, all of a sudden you miss it—even though you never knew you wanted it before you had it. All these nerve endings flapping in the breeze, looking for the tooth that just fell out.
    But there’s something bigger—something worse. Once someone has been that close to you, he’s got too much on you. He knows how to hurt you, how to push those goddamn buttons. Hell, he can push them without even realizing it.
    I want to be calm, cool, buttonless. No way in, no way out. Not even a zipper.
    Not fearless, feelingless. That’s a genetic mutation I could really get behind.
    Ed
    Here is the thing I have to get through my thick, stupid head: The Gaia I fell in love with obviously does not exist. Therefore, I do not care that she’s gone. Right? WHO CARES? NOT ME. I don’t care that she lied, snuck around, maybe even cheated on me with Sam. Since the dependable, honest person I thought she was never existed, technically, I can’t miss her. How can you miss a mythical creature? Do I miss unicorns? No. Do I miss the Yeti? No. Do I miss Anna Nicole Smith’s dietician? No. And why is that? Because none of those creatures can exist, do exist, will exist. And I don’t miss Gaia-my-best-friend because she doesn’t exist, either. Now I should be cured.
    Except I’m not. The feelings I had for her—the ones that just yesterday were a huge, comfortable blanket around my heart—they just won’t get out of me. No matter how much evidence I tally up to the contrary, those feelings want to swim around in my consciousness.
    The word love keeps floating around inside my head, like the afterimage of a flashbulb. Except in my head the word love is purple, and it looks kind of like a balloon. When I met Gaia for the first time, I saw that love balloon in my head. It was small then and just hovered around in the background as I thought about calculus, and history, and my Regents exams. I got to know her better, and I started to think, Maybe I love her. Maybe this word I’ve heard about all my life has a new meaning, maybe it’s something I feel for this girl.
    That’s when the love balloon started getting bigger. But the color of a real balloon gets paler as it fills with air. The love balloon in my head just became a richer shade of purple, and when I thought of Gaia, it got bigger. The night we spent together, it got huge. And whatever I was doing in my day, that purple balloon would bounce around and make me feel great, because I knew what it meant and I felt all this love for this weird, annoying, funny, crazy girl. I’d say to myself, like I was trying it out, “Oh, I love Gaia,” and it made me feel so great.
    Well, now I don’t love Gaia. I was wrong about her and I was wrong about feeling that way about her. But the big purple love balloon DOES NOT GET THE MESSAGE. It still bounces around in my head, but now, instead of being comforting, it’s annoying, like Barney.
    I try to poke it with an imaginary needle, but it’s made of some really tough kind of rubber. I try to make it burst into flames and hit the ground, like the Hindenburg. Oh, the