You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

I wish I could change everything about myself but it's just—it's too late to do anything, that's the problem. It's all so fucked up, and I just don't who I am anymore, you know? Like, who is this person who made all these choices that I just have to live with? I look back at that person and I hate her, I hate her so much for what she did to me, that person is like my nemesis, my worst enemy, but the problem is, that person is me.

But I guess that was the whole problem, at that point, my inability to deal with normal human interaction.

Perhaps the problem with adulthood was that you weighed the consequences of your actions too carefully, in a way that left you with a life you despised.

Still, she really did seem to be absurdly into this. It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.

When I try to reconstruct the place that I was, at that point in my life, to figure out how I got there, to that punch, to that bed, to that girl—I can't. I can see where some bad decisions led to some other bad decisions, but I can't get all the way there; it's like I imagine a curve, where I'm dropping lower and lower down, and then I'm off the radar screen, invisible, and then, after some time goes by, the line is rising, visible again, and I don't know what happened in between.

I had done magic. Sometimes, when people in stories encounter the paranormal, they react with horror as the fabric of reality shreds and they are faced with the dawning recognition that everything they once believed was a lie. As I stared down at my phone, I had that exact feeling, except the opposite: not horror but a giddy, mounting joy. This was what all those books had promised. I knew it, I thought. I knew the world was more interesting than it was pretending to be.

There must be a German word for this feeling, when the elaborate contortions of your own thinking rose to the surface and became suddenly and unpleasantly visible. Like walking past a mirror in a crowded mall and thinking: Who is that dude with the terrible posture, and why is he cringing like he expects someone to punch him, I'd like to punch him—oh wait, that's me.

So this was kissing. He had to admit Rachel seemed into it. She kept kind of rolling around and sighing. Would he be enjoying himself more if he were kissing Anna? Frankly, it was hard to ever imagine being turned on by this activity. Two boneless slabs of flesh, flopping around, like a pair of slugs mating in the cavern of your mouth. Gross, Ted. What was wrong with him?

He had no faith in love's capacity to cause him anything but pain.

Fantasies were fantasies, but it was important to keep at least one foot in the realm of the real.

Listen, listen. I can explain. There's a bad Ted underneath the good Ted, yes, but then, under that, there's a Ted who's good for real. But no one ever sees him; his whole life, no one ever has. Underneath it all, I'm just that kid who wanted nothing more than to be loved and didn't know how to make it happen, even though I tried and tried and tried.

All I've ever wanted is to be loved. Well, to be worshiped. To be desired, madly and painfully, to the exclusion of all else. Is that so wrong?

Lizzie is hapless about romance in an ironic, self-deprecating way.

She puts her head on his shoulder, and for a second, it's like the other good night, the night of the bonfire, the brief lifting of the yoke, freedom from the circle: Marco hurting Anna, Anna hurting Ted, Ted hurting Rachel, these endless rounds of jealousy and harm.

On the other hand, she happily kept him informed about plans she had with other people, providing a steady flow of information about excursions that were about to happen, details of dates or parties that were always this close to coming together. As long as he listened, without complaint, to an endless description of activities that were supposed to happen without him, there was a 30 percent chance, at least, that Anna would change her mind at the last minute, claim to be unable to handle the unbearable burden of whatever her social plans were supposed to be, and decide to hang out with him instead. She'd arrive at his house and collapse in exaggerated relief: "I am so glad we're doing this, I was so not in the mood for another party at Maria's." As though they were both equally at the mercy of circumstance, similarly oblivious to the power dynamic that governed their "friendship.

He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.

Every so often, over the next day or so, she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she'd realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she'd imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.

What do you want to do now?" he asked her. "We should probably just kill ourselves," she imagined saying.

Why did no one satisfy her? What was she looking for that she couldn't find? Her battered heart offered her no answers.

What a fantastical place adulthood has turned out to be: with the power of social media and a thousand dollars, she's summoned Taylor's dream crush out of an ancient VHS tape and brought him here, to life.

I'm a nice guy, I swear to fucking God.

I didn't mean to hurt anyone, he tries to tell them. I just wanted to be seen, and loved for who I am. The problem was, it was all a misunderstanding. I pretended to be a good person, and then I couldn't stop.

There are tears in her eyes. Ted has never seen her look so despondent, and Anna often looks very, very sad.

Ted kisses Rachel with tongue and squeezes her ass. In doing so, he discovers that it is possible to enjoy something and yet not care about it in the slightest. He finds this sensation—feeling pleasure, and simultaneously feeling detached from the pleasure—to be, itself, quite pleasurable. He wonders if he has miraculously become a Buddhist, or suffered a psychotic break.

For the first time, Ted imagined fucking Anna the way he (almost) fucked Rachel: cruelly, without concern for her comfort, fully acknowledging that as much as he loved her, he hated her, too.

Did he even exist in her mind, as a living, breathing, thinking person? He spent so much time trying to figure out what she was thinking, but what kind of a consciousness did she imagine lived behind the mask of his face?

Anna, are you asleep?" He imagined Anna lying awake, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, her heart full of yearning, but there was only silence. "I love you, Anna," he whispered, and he hung up the phone.

As Anna poured her heart out over the phone, Ted's own heart lit up like a solar flare. He wanted nothing more than to show Anna how he saw her: how beautiful and perfect she was in his eyes. He needed to let her know that he was going to carry that memory—that knowledge—of her inside him, so that no matter what happened between them, no matter how down she got on herself, he could do this for her: he could love her, selflessly and unceasingly, with total commitment and purity, for the rest of his life. An hour later, Anna sniffled. 'Thank you for listening, Ted,' she said. 'It really means a lot to me.' I would die for you, Ted thought. 'No problemo,' Ted said.

I can't believe you called me," Anna said. "Nobody else from home has called me in forever. It's like they forgot about me. You think you're so close to people but when it comes down to it, they just forget.

Why do you like me? Why can't you tell I'm not that into you?