The Overthinkers Read online

  Not today. She smiled at me in a tight-lipped way, her eyes fixed on me.

  Who did PR? Who wanted to spin shit for the rest of their lives? Or work for big corporates trying to sell people stuff? I didn’t get it. I didn’t get anyone that did our degree to be honest. Not even myself. The only reason I’d picked it was because I’d liked writing, and my dad had been a journalist, and it seemed like a reasonable enough profession. I mean, who knows what they actually want to do when they are eighteen? It seems like a completely perverse decision to make a kid make at that age.

  Maybe I should tell her this? I had read somewhere that sharing creates an intimacy. Where was it? I tried to shoe-horn the extract out of my brain but it was stuck somewhere in between drunk and judgmental.

  Do it, Benji. Go for it. What did I have to lose? I could either remain here in silence with this girl, who was standing way too close to me again, or I could say something.

  “Who knows why we’re doing this degree anyway, it’s so random,” I managed.

  Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  It wasn’t the reaction I was after.

  I tried to make sense of my thoughts, and seize on something relevant and profound to impress her. Was I trying to impress her? Maybe I just wanted her to say something interesting. Something weighty or substantial, that might marry up to the gravity of her beautiful face.

  “You know it’s kind of like a bit of a nothing degree. Like who will we be at the end? Not a doctor, or an engineer, or a teacher or anything ... Just something kind of ...” I trailed off. Something muted, or muffled, or non-descript? I didn’t know what the right word was.

  Her brow was still wrinkled. Actually, more so now. That hadn’t worked.

  “But won’t you be a journalist?”

  Hmmm ... she had a point. Also, she knew what strand I was in, without me having mentioned it. How did she know that?

  “And I’ll be like ... a PR.”

  Is that what they called them? It sounded wrong.

  “I want to run my own company one day, which focuses on brands that are ethically and socially conscious.”

  She brightened at this comment. But it kind of made me vomit in my mouth a little, in its put-on woke-ness.

  “That’s woke of you.” There was a critical tone in my voice. I couldn’t help it. I was a judgmental person. It was something I was working on. I should have been working on it right now, but my blood-alcohol level wasn’t low enough to allow for self-reflection. I knew Leo had a go at me for being woke, but the quality was so frightfully conceited and put on. I hoped he wasn’t completely serious when he said it to me.

  “I thought you were into that sort of thing?”

  She looked kind of wounded. Snap – I just had a tiny epiphany. It was the kind of look I would wear, when I had just tried to say something to impress someone (like Francesca Moore, or my parents, or a lecturer) only to be met by an offhand smackdown.

  Offhand smackdowns were the worst – because no thought had gone into them. They meant the other person (the person delivering the body blow) really didn’t give a shit. They couldn’t even be bothered to craft a relevant response.

  I didn’t want to be that person.

  How did this chick even know all this stuff about me? Is this what everyone thought about me, not just Leo?

  The internal dialogue was killing me.

  “No totally ... I see what you’re saying,” I said nodding my head a few times to reinforce the message.

  Her face lit up, finally pleased. Like she had landed a comment that made sense to me.

  As I finished that beer in record time, I concluded she did know way too much about me ... maybe I was her Francesca Moore? I couldn’t imagine being anyone’s Francesca Moore to be honest. I wasn’t made of the stuff that people crafted fan Tumblr’s from. I was annoyingly smart, and try-hardish in nature. My friends were losers. Except for Leo, he was kind of a cut above. I didn’t have a car ... or any real direction either. It was kind of hard to visualise.

  But here was this girl, looking at me adoringly.

  It was incredibly hot in that tiny corner I was jammed into with Maddison, and things were starting to swim slightly. There were coloured fairy lights strung up across the courtyard, which threw down an eerie glow on the rest of us. Maddison had a purplish hue to her, maybe it made her seem more interesting. Or maybe I didn’t want to let her down. This night should live up to someone’s expectations. It was impregnated with prospects. It was the kind of night, the kind of vibe, which you just knew you would re-imagine at some point as a memory. You would remember this moment. When you still had these opportunities. When things were ripe for the taking. When your story was still untold.

  I could almost feel the nostalgia of that moment, even though I was in it.

  “What are you smiling at?” she asked, so close to my face now.

  “Nothing, I just had this strange thought.”

  “What was it?”

  “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?”

  Her eyes lit up in a strange way. It occurred to me that she had taken the words out of context, and thought they applied to her. And they didn’t. They didn’t really apply to anyone – just the moment ... but she leant in and kissed me anyway. For the record, she kissed me. It was entirely unexpected and I had in no way set the events into motion. But I kissed her back. I guess it was nice to be kissed by someone, to be wanted by someone. It made all of my late teenage angst, and lack of self-worth slip quietly into the background. It was nice to feel worthy for a second, even if the girl that was making me feel that way wasn’t the one I had really wanted to begin with.

  The kiss went on for a while, maybe it was even messy. Who cared? I was stuck in some sort of alcohol haze/future nostalgic moment. It had a cotton-wool affect. Like there was cotton-wool stuck in my ears, and maybe down my throat as well, and everything felt like it was happening but not happening at the same time. Her hand was inconspicuously down my pants, and yeah it was nice. Things could be worse. I could still be in the kitchen with Leo scrolling through Grindr and watching other people make-out.

  A while later, my head started to clear, and in between making out, and having poorer than average exchanges with Maddison, it occurred to me I should get myself out of this situation. But I was torn ... like quite realistically sex was on the cards, and I could count the number of times I’d had sex on one hand. I was really in no position to say no to such an offer. And I didn’t mind Maddison, she was beautiful ... and she liked me, clearly. I kind of had the feeling that she might be unbearably dumb, but that was a total judgment call based on the one hundred words we had exchanged, and a few categorical leaps. The prompts certainly indicated that she was an uninspiring, eastern suburbs PR girl, who wanted to work with “woke” brands without realising that exploitation was the underlying force in selling any consumer goods. But wasn’t exploitation always the underlying force?

  Maybe I was exploiting her right now?

  The thought startled me into complete sobriety.

  Shit, I was. Totally exploiting her.

  I jumped back slightly, and I realised she was wearing that wrinkled look again, clearly surprised by my sudden panic.

  I smiled, trying to smooth over the issue without revealing that we were all cogs in the capitalist system, and even woke people were misusing others.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I declared. “Do you want a drink?”

  “Yeah, yeah, thanks,” she recovered.

  I had no intention of getting her a drink. I had no intention of coming back.

  As I headed back towards the kitchen, she called: “Oh, do you mind getting me a Pinot Grigio though?”

  Of course. There it was.

  “I brought a bottle, it’s in the fridge door. It’s got a yellow label on it.”

  I nodded and smiled tight-lipped. Don’t judge her
. Don’t judge her. Don’t judge her. It was like a mantra in my mind. A Jedi mind trick. But it was literally just words, slipping and sliding around the grey matter and having no impact whatsoever.

  I was. Judging her.

  I slid into the kitchen. There were less people around now, and I wondered what time it was, and how long I had been out there for. I had slipped into some sort of parallel, drunk, make-out, time zone.

  Leo was still sitting at the table scrolling. That was kind of a good sign. But then he could drop into a Grindr-hole for hours, so it wasn’t very comforting either.

  “Hey,” I said to him, on my way to the fridge, to steal another one of Dan’s beers and not the Pinot Grigio that Maddison was after.

  “You’re back.”

  I nodded.

  “You look kind of weird. Did you suck that girl’s face off?”

  Totally unhelpful.

  “Absolutely disgusting.”

  Really, really unhelpful.

  Back in the house my mind reconnected with the one thought that had been driving it all evening (with a brief interruption which had mainly been led by my dick, and unfounded nostalgia for the current moment).

  “Where’s Francesca?” I asked.

  “I think she left,” he responded.

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Not long.”

  He was still scrolling. I felt kind of desperate at that moment. Okay, shit, I felt kind of desperate all the time. Had she caught me mid make-out session? Or did she just leave with that jerk Hamish? And why was Leo being such a douche? Like how could I convey to Leo that this was of utmost importance without appearing dangerously emotionally invested in Francesca Moore?

  I cogitated. And the silence must have jolted him from his Grindr infinite scroll.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You look like you’re having an emotional meltdown.”

  “Hardly. I’m just standing here.”

  “You’ve got that look on your face. Like your head might explode.”

  I did have a headache, and I could feel my temples pulsating. But it was likely just the alcohol. Maybe I should drink some water.

  “I’m going,” I told him, instead. It seemed the only plausible alternative.

  “What?” he asked for the umpteenth time, still holding his mobile.

  I grabbed the half-drunk beer thinking this was not the moment to sober up, and headed down the corridor, completely conscious of what I was doing. I would likely look back on this moment and reframe it. I would think, I had every intent to go back out and tell Maddison that I had to leave. But one thing led to another and I never got to do that. I would think, it wasn’t really a big deal. It was just some drunken make-out session, and then we both went our separate ways. It meant absolutely nothing, and she wouldn’t care at all.

  The thing is, it could be re-configured like that. It was totally possible. And when you remembered things, with the slight tightening of the edges of the memory, a little nip and tuck, a coloured filter ... it worked. It became the story you wanted to remember.

  But as I left that place, I knew it. I knew I was a dickhead for doing it. I knew it meant something to Maddison. I knew I should go out there and tell Maddison exactly what I’d done. I knew I should explain myself to Leo and apologise for being a shit friend.

  But I just shoved all of that stuff down deep. Because it was easier that way.

  It occurred to me as I exited onto Crown Street, noisy, and still hot from the humid day, that this was exactly what it meant to be woke. Knowing that you were doing the wrong thing, but doing it anyway.

  And that’s why being woke was such bullshit.

  I pulled my phone out of the pocket of my jeans and texted Francesca Moore.

  “Where are you? Are you still here?”

  Another pseudo lie. Leo had said she’d left.

  Seen. Appeared under the text.

  My heart started to beat slightly faster.

  The three little dots appeared, she was writing something. That was promising and terrifying at the same time. I stopped walking, as I watched the dots move, and waited.

  Had she seen me? Is that why she had left? Did she even care? Why should I even be bothered? She had made it pretty clear she was with that Hamish guy. Why couldn’t I make-out with a girl? It was totally fine.

  Again, there was the lie. I knew it wasn’t totally fine ... I knew there was something quietly seedy about the whole thing. Not overtly seedy or anything. But quietly.

  We had a contract together. Francesca Moore and I. Of the silent variety. It was made up of a thousand prompts, expressions, words, and the space between them. The imagined space between them. There was something between us, and it wasn’t necessarily quantifiable. I couldn’t go back and document it, and then provide you with the definition of the intimacy. I couldn’t weigh it, or do a sum to come up with a result, or even hold it in my hands. But it was there.

  It was most definitely there.

  I knew it, and she knew it. Even though we had never uttered the words.

  And I had just gone and fucked it up.

  She’d been writing for a long time. That either meant it was a long text ... which didn’t bode well. Or she’d been writing and erasing, writing and erasing, trying to get the words right ... which also didn’t bode well.

  Or maybe she was just distracted.

  Having sex with Hamish Chiel. Also, a likely outcome when it came to Francesca Moore. The thought of her not caring at all, turned my stomach more than the other outcomes.

  “What are you doing?” Leo asked me. He’d followed me out. I looked up at him momentarily. His dark features surrounded by the darkness and sound of Crown Street. He looked kind of like a question mark, an outward representation of what was going on inside of me.

  Or just like a puddle of flesh. Ripped. But still flesh. I was dis-associating. The councillor told me I could do that in moments of high stress. Things started to not look like things anymore, just a jumble of stuff.

  My phone buzzed, and my eyes snapped back down.

  Don’t text me.

  Three words, four if you didn’t count the contraction, from Francesca Moore. The panic in me dialled up several notches. Maybe ten. Fifty. One hundred. Potentially even a thousand times.

  It was not dialled up, it was ratcheted up, cranked up.

  Leo was right, my head was about to explode.

  What to do? What to do? What to do?

  That’s when I did something desperate and stalker-y too. Like, let’s be real, it wasn’t the first time I’d done it either. And it always came with the same tang of lunatic/lost the plot odour.

  I tapped onto the SnapChat app, and looked up Francesca’s location. We’d shared our locations way back when we had first met. At the time it had been cute, and it made me feel like we were close in some way. Like we were sharing something about our lives. Maybe the most intimate detail.

  Our locations.

  But since then I’d had brief moments of vulnerability, when I’d just wanted to know where she was ... and it had become a tiny addiction. So I’d stopped a week or so ago.

  It was like a crack addition. I knew, I was weak.

  Woke and weak all at the same time.

  And now I had to do it. Provided she hadn’t switched it off.

  And she hadn’t.

  There she was a tiny circular dot on a map ... just down the road in Darlinghurst.

  Buoyed by the notion and a manic kind of energy, I sped up in that direction.

  “Where are you going?” Leo called after me.

  I knew I was trying the friendship. But Leo was good for it. He was the best guy I knew even when he was obnoxiously drunk and Grindr spiralling.

  “I’m going to find Francesca Moore.”

  As I stormed off I heard him call: “Fuck off then.”

  I could have ripped him a new one.
>
  Instead I kept my mouth laced shut. I watched him, as his lanky frame hot-footed it up Crown Street. It was hard watching your best friend make mistakes. It was even harder knowing you had warned them about it, and they’d not taken your advice.

  Francesca was not into Benji. Benji was a bright, smart guy, who should have been wasting his time writing his first novel, or at the very least working out, instead of chasing after a girl who was, at best, ambivalent about her feelings towards him. His one-track focus on Francesca made me feel kind of sick. It was unwarranted and so completely unrequired.

  I shook my head. It was like watching a train wreck about to happen, only in slow motion ... and I kept warning the passengers and conductor but they all went on their merry way, doing exactly the same thing. Oblivious to the collision up ahead.

  Fuck! I would let it go, if only I didn’t like the guy so much. The intrusive thought made me want to scream. No matter how many times I repressed how I felt about Benji it kept bubbling up to surface. Could I potentially be every gay cliché? The gay with the Daddy who wouldn’t leave his wife, the gay that secretly hated himself and had no self-worth, the gay that had feelings for his straight best-friend ... stop thinking that!

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. Maybe it was Luca. I had texted him a couple of hours ago to see if he was free to catch-up. He hadn’t responded. As the minutes had ticked by, I knew why. He was with his wife. At this very moment. I had run through what they could have been doing together. Were they having dinner at some fancy restaurant? Finishing off a couple of bottles of wine, the one’s he would have usually shared with me? Would he be making acerbic jokes, the ones I would have laughed at? Or were they fucking?

  It could have been any of those things – or all of them in that order.

  I glanced down at the phone and hoped.

  It wasn’t him. It was the “advertisement for an STD” I’d swiped right on a couple of hours ago.

  Hey.

  The message read. Creative. Standard Grindr discussion starter. What was I expecting from someone who had posed in their underwear for every pic in their profile? A poet?

  Hey.

  I responded, unable to summon the enthusiasm to doll out a less tedious response.