The Overthinkers Read online

  Punching so far above, and now staring at me too, incredibly intently, like he was really trying to get through to me. Poor Dad, I mean he was kind enough, loving really. I just felt like he may have watched too many episodes of The O.C. in his formative years and modelled himself around Sandy Cohen as a result.

  “It’s not the course,” I said, rubbing my forehead. I didn’t want to be a journalist, I wanted to be a writer. But this articulation was consistently disregarded.

  I could feel myself starting to crumble. It was a combination of things. Poor resolve, of course, classic issue for me. The Jedi mind tricks that my parents deployed. They were up, down, and around, and everywhere, until you finally spilled your guts. And of course ... sadness ... or as my mum would call it “grief”. Yeah, okay, I was kind of sad.

  It occurred to me that I was truly an unlikeable character.

  “Then what?” She chewed vigorously at me.

  Make it stop! Make it stop!

  “Nothing ... it’s just about a girl.”

  “Oh a girl, right,” Mum responded, in a lower tone, like it wasn’t a very interesting revelation. And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, it really meant nothing at all. It had just kind of fucking broken my heart.

  But whatever.

  “Is this someone you’re dating?” Dad asked, hot-footing it across to this subject.

  “Not exactly ... we were just talking.”

  “What does that mean?” Dad said looking at Anjanette. “Does that mean they’re talking online? Or in person ... just talking ... what does it mean?”

  “No, I think that means they were talking online and in person, and probably having sex, but it was casual.”

  Thanks Mum. All that time spent in the field talking to the youth of today about gender, sexuality and intimacy had equipped her with terms, which I’d wished she wouldn’t have understood.

  “Oh I see ... okay, and so now, what? You’re not talking any longer?” Did I mention his name was Nathanial Carroll? A great name for a journalist.

  I’m Nathanial Carroll, thanks for joining us on ABC news.

  “Yep, we’re not talking anymore.”

  Not talking at all. No sex. No texts. No chats. Nada. Maybe para siempre.

  Likely, in fact.

  “And you want to talk to her again?” he continued.

  I felt my eyes widening. The same expression my mum got when she was being pushed that little bit too far.

  “Yes, I would like to talk to her again.”

  Indeed. Talk to her. Send her messages. Have sex with her. Whatever order it happened in. See, I wasn’t really woke, I just pretended to be.

  “Well then text her! Send her a message mate. Do something about it! Get in there!”

  Thanks Nathanial.

  Carpe the fucking diem.

  That was Anjanette and Nathaniel. They did carpe every fucking diem. But not so much me. Like I said, things usually happened to me, I didn’t happen to them.

  “You know only children should not be allowed. It should be the reverse of the one-child policy in China,” I said instead. Throw them off the chase already.

  “You know why we only had one child,” Anjanette interjected.

  “Yep ... because having more would be greedy. White, privileged people sucking up resources,” I filled in. I was familiar with the argument.

  “Something like that.”

  “Yeah, but it hasn’t been good for my mental stability. I feel like if you’d had another kid to focus on ... there would have been less of this meddling ... and in addition, maybe I would have not been in my head so much, because I would have had someone my age to talk to.”

  “Oh please ... your overthinking is not our issue.”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. Instantly I was distracted. A haze descended. I could feel the weight, and density of that incredibly light thing for the first time in hours.

  Was it her? Could it be her?

  I’d built up my resolve all week. Told myself to forget her. To refocus. To change direction. Yep, all the positive psychology shit I’d been taught as a teenager. But here it was, just decomposing in seconds.

  Literally in seconds.

  The possibility that it could be her was too immense. It had to be dealt with immediately.

  Fuck the resolve.

  I tugged my mobile out of my jeans. There it was, a message on the screen.

  It wasn’t her. Of course not.

  It was an unknown number. The digits stared back at me. New ones. That had never been saved into my phone.

  I read the message:

  Hey Benji, it’s Maddison, from the party. We didn’t get to say bye the other night. Just thought I’d text you, so you have my number, in case you want to hang out sometime.

  Maddison.

  Yep, I was unofficially an unlikable guy.

  “Was that her?” I heard my dad ask.

  I shook my head.

  Nope.

  Maddison would never be Francesca Moore.

  I turned the phone over on the table.

  It started buzzing. Shit, she wasn’t actually calling me now, was she?

  Both of them stared at me, like they were expecting me to do something. What? Answer the phone now?

  “Are you going to pick that up?” Mum.

  I pulled a face, and turned the phone over again. It wasn’t her. It was Leo. Never before had I been more pleased to see those three letters. That’s how weak I was.

  “Leo?”

  “Benji?” He sounded kind of out of breath and desperate.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No. I need your help. Can you come and get me?”

  “Yeah, where are you.”

  “In Rose Bay. I’ve just left Luca’s house. Can you come and pick me up?”

  He sounded off, strange, panicky. It was familiar, although it was usually me and not him.

  “Yeah, of course. Text me the address.”

  I hung up. The pair of them were looking at me, like I was a foreign specimen. Their privileged, semi-woke, bratty, only child. By no means an investigative journalist, nor a gay. Potential upper levels of mediocrity.

  That was me.

  “Can I borrow the car?” I asked.

  I could barely see the screen of my phone because of the blinding sunshine. I was at the beach with Chloe. But my head was somewhere else.

  I squinted at it, and then cupped my hand around my phone to see the screen more clearly.

  The text had been sent.

  And there were those four letters, grey in colour, slender in font. Seen.

  I waited, and bit my bottom lip.

  I waited to see those three little dots, an indication that he was writing something in return. But there was nothing.

  Just my text. And those four letters underneath it.

  Plus the sinking sensation that he had read the text, and just turned his phone over. Case upwards.

  I’d seen him do that at uni in tutorials. His phone would buzz, he’d pull it out, usually from his jeans, look at the message, and then turn it over on the desk. Like whatever was written was unimportant. Like it was something that could be dealt with later.

  I was something that could be dealt with at another time.

  It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to me. I knew I wasn’t front of mind for him. It was pretty clear. He never glanced in my direction. On the odd occasion his eyes would stumble across mine, and they would just keep going. Scanning the room. Like there was nothing about me that was interesting enough to capture his attention.

  The first time I had seen him was at orientation day a couple of years ago. He had been standing with Leo. They were waiting for their order. Casually having a laugh. He was so pretty. Kind of tall and slender, and he wore his hair long. Shoulder length and blonde. Messy. Big green eyes, and a generous smile, which split his face in half like an arrow.

  It was like he was surrounded by something. Almost like an au
ra. He stood out from the crowd like a character in a pop-up book. Real and three-dimensional, in an otherwise flat landscape.

  From the moment I’d seen him I knew I wouldn’t be able to forget him.

  He was imprinted on the back of my eyelids. Stencilled on the inside.

  It’s not like there were heaps of students on campus at the one time. It was usually the same faces that fronted up at similar times for lectures or tutorials. He was in the communications faculty building. So, he was either visiting a friend, or he did comms. But it had been orientation day. It was pretty probable that like me, he was just starting up here.

  I had watched him from my spot in the line, as he laughed with Leo. Hands shoved into pockets. Like he didn’t have a care in the world. He seemed at ease with things. With himself. With everything. I liked that about him. Because I never felt at ease. Not with anything. Despite the fact that I was intrinsically part of the in-crowd. In and out at the same time.

  Their order had been called, and the pair of them had gathered their take-away coffees, and walked past me. I’d had my eyes fixed on his. I was hoping they might lock. That he might give me a rueful smile, some sort of indication that I’d been seen. But instead they skimmed straight past me, without losing a beat.

  I had screen-shot his image in my mind. Memorised it in detail.

  Then he had turned up again in one of my classes. Data, tools and stories. That was the class. Bag slung casually over his shoulder. Air-pods still in. Throwing his smile around wildly like he didn’t care who it hit.

  And still he didn’t notice me.

  Not even when I sat near him, and asked him a couple of questions. Well meaning, smart ones that I had plotted in advance. He’d just glanced at me, and smiled, and given me a straight response.

  Nothing more to it.

  I wasn’t sure if he realised it, but he was kind of like the class golden boy. He made the right comments, at the right time. The lecturer, a dorky looking guy with a penchant for nineties grunge attire had a crush on him too. I wasn’t sure if it was an infatuation, or just a reflection on Benji’s pedigree – his dad was some award-winning journalist, and his mum was an academic. That wasn’t pedigree to me, but it was to our dorky lecturer.

  I’d sat in class after class with him.

  I’d kept asking those well-meaning questions, and he literally had no idea who I was.

  That’s how boring I was.

  I had failed to make any impression on him. None whatsoever.

  And yet I knew him. I had memorised the look he gave when he knew he said something clever, the smile that bloomed on his face when he really thought something was funny, and the one he served when he was just pretending ... I knew them all. They were carefully catalogued in my Benjamin Carroll mental encyclopedia.

  He didn’t even know my name.

  I wasn’t even exaggerating.

  I’d thought he might turn up at Dan’s party. Dan was a cool Sydney gay. Everyone who was anyone knew him, and everyone who was anyone liked him. It was plausible that Dan knew Benji, via two links:

  1. Dan was tight with Leo, who was Benji’s bestie, and they all lifted weights at that gay gym in Potts Point.

  2. Dan knew Hamish, via a Sydney drug scene loop, who was pseudo dating Francesca, who Benji pined after (I wasn’t stupid. I knew that too). Hamish was dull, not particularly clever but cute and well connected enough to still circulate at the highest levels of the Sydney eastern suburbs party scene. Especially when he was dealing.

  Any one of whom might have asked Benji to come to the party. It was a stretch. A series of plausible links.

  And he’d turned up. With all of them to be exact. Leo, Hamish and Francesca.

  Fucking Francesca.

  She wasn’t one of them, and she never would be. Her background was kind of unknown, which led everyone to believe it wasn’t a legitimate one. She had come up off the back of being kind of cute, volatile, incredibly thin, and Hamish Chiel’s girlfriend. Or sidepiece.

  Who even dated Hamish Chiel? His dick had literally been everywhere.

  But I suppose when you had to come up, you had to tie yourself to any kind of boat. Even if it was a dingy.

  One thing was for certain, Francesca Moore, was a social climber.

  That was unfair, but I couldn’t help it. Every time I tried to put the thought out of my mind, it clambered back in. Because I liked him and he liked her. Maybe if we’d met in different circumstances things would have been different.

  But at this point all I could see was the social climber in her.

  Six months into her first year at university, she had assimilated into the highest circles. She had started wearing the right clothes, going to the right parties, and hanging around the right people.

  It was all a set of alliances, you see. Allegiances. Getting in with the right people. Partying with the right people. Supporting the right people.

  And Francesca Moore was strategic in her approach. It was like watching someone play Pac-Man or something. She was on the road to being a fully-fledged eastern suburbs party girl, and eventually a trophy wife that owned a boutique in Mosman, and holidayed in obscure locations before they got cool.

  How’s your Instagram account, girl? Up to scratch? How many likes did you just buy?

  Francesca was running some sort of girl out of control campaign. The drugs, and partying, and eating disorder ... it was so 1995. But somehow it was working, and it wasn’t just working on Hamish Chiel, it was also working on Benjamin Carroll, who seemed kind of besotted by her.

  It made me sick thinking about it.

  I mean maybe I was imagining it. Maybe I just thought that was the case because I wanted him, but it was hard not to make assumptions. I couldn’t erase the looks he would pass her ... all the time. At university ... and even at Dan’s party on Saturday night.

  Yeah, I’d seen it.

  He had been watching Francesca and Hamish make-out, and he’d looked kind of green.

  And who was I kidding? I knew that had been my opportunity, to step in. To save him from the spectacle, and maybe for him to consider me over her. Even if it was just to make her jealous, or to get her out of his head.

  There it was, a clean break. A chance, a prospect, that I’d not had with Benji ever, and so I’d tossed myself into his field of vision.

  As soon as his eyes connected with mine, I knew he didn’t know who I was. They were vague. Like I was any chick. And to him I was, any chick.

  “I think we go to uni together,” I’d said, smiling.

  And he’d nodded, so maybe he kind of knew.

  “Maddison,” I’d supplied.

  Lying back on the towel now at the beach, I played the event over quietly in my mind. Thumbed over it gently, the sound of the quiet water rolling in.

  I’d told him my name pre-emptively. It would have hurt if he’d asked me what my name was. And I’d known he was about to.

  “Ben,” he had responded, still looking kind of vacant. He had skimmed my outfit casually with those green eyes. The high-wasted jeans and t-shirt. It was kind of basic for a party, but I wasn’t the kind of girl that screamed about her appearance.

  “Benji,” filled in Leo. His BFF. They were as thick as thieves those two. A strange but kind of expected combination.

  I know, I wanted to say. I know everyone calls you Benji. It’s adorable. I can imagine myself saying it. A lot.

  But I’d pretended I didn’t.

  When he asked me to have a drink outside, I knew that he was looking for the distraction. Or maybe he was just being careless. I wasn’t sure which it was. He wasn’t that interested in me, I could tell.

  But, I could change his mind.

  Standing in the corner of that dive of an outdoor area, surrounded by those ratchet fairy lights, I couldn’t help standing too close to him. There was something about him. I don’t know ... it was like there was something more to Benji ... more than anyone else.

  Like when I’d seen hi
m in that three-dimensional way the first time. A pop-out piece. It was like he shimmered with a sensitivity, an embodiment, whilst everyone else was dull.

  He understood things.

  I don’t know, maybe I wanted to be seen as something more. Maybe I wanted his three-dimensional quality to rub off on me and make me feel alive.

  Was that weird?

  It was something my friends wouldn’t understand. It was something I would never be able to talk to them about.

  I’d been trying so hard to impress him and I’d been landing nowhere. And it had been frustrating. Why did I need to impress him and Francesca didn’t? She didn’t need to say or do anything of interest to draw his attention. While I felt like I had to juggle knives to get him to even look at me.

  Then he’d said:

  “I don’t know ... like sometimes you catch yourself in a moment and you know you’re going to remember it, before it even happens?”

  And that was it. I was a puddle in front of him.

  I knew Benji wanted to be a writer. He’d told me once when I’d asked him one of those well-meaning rehearsed questions. Only he’d forgotten.

  And that’s the thing ... he possessed a feeling, an insight to the human condition which was singular. That’s why he was threedimensional. He was strung up and suspended by the stars. He was made by their very stuffing.

  Yeah. He made me feel something – and I wanted to feel something, so much.

  So I kissed him, and we made out ... a lot. And it was everything I’d imagined it to be. Did it go a step too far? Maybe. But I’d been desperate, and I’d wanted him to like it, even if he didn’t like me.

  And then he’d just remembered himself, he’d sobered up and realised that I was the wrong girl. And he’d walked away.

  When I’d asked him for a Pinot Grigio instead of a beer, I knew he wasn’t coming back. Maybe I just said the request to hear it. To experience that final electrifying moment of us being together.

  A thing.

  I smiled now.

  The hot rays beating down on my skin.

  It wasn’t so bad that he didn’t know my name, or that he didn’t even text me back. I was kind of warmed by the fact that I’d had him even for a single moment.