21 Definitions of Like (and One Aside)
Let’s begin with the boy in Latin class who writes you a note, in proper Latin no less, asking you to attend the homecoming dance with him. At least this is what you think the note says, and also that he likes you. Supporting your version of this translation is the fact he is always looking at you, at least looking at the left side of your face, as that is where he sits every day, to your left. You spend the time it takes to conjugate the verb abstinere trying to like him back, but upon reaching the third person plural, you feel nothing new, no blossoming of newly nervous flowers in your stomach, or whatever it’s supposed to feel like. So you fold his note over once then you write a lie, in English, your Latin being nowhere near as good as his: As my parents have forbidden dating as long as I’m living under their roof, I must decline your offer (kindly).
The boy you might actually like does not ask you to any dances nor does he really talk to you. This could be one reason you think you like him. Instead of talking to you, he moves away at the end of the semester to a posher suburb north of where you live, but his mother is friends with your mother and they stay in touch. “He’s really quite lonely there,” your mother tells you, “and so smart. That boy is smart and lonely just like you.” She suggests that you and this lonely smart boy might go out for dinner or something, as she is desperate for you to begin dating or at least taking an interest in the idea. Dating is both a healthy and a normal activity, she has pointed out to you on numerous occasions, and who doesn’t want to appear healthy and normal? You agree to give it a try. One night, after your mother talks to his mother, half an hour of laughter and lowered voices, the phone is passed to you.
It’s difficult to articulate why you might like this boy whom your friends have always considered to be odd. His defining characteristics are that he used to suck on a house key he wore on a chain around his neck (“That key is one of the five grossest things in existence,” a friend insisted) and he filled the back of every one of his notebooks with drawings of fighter planes. He continued drawing the planes even after your history teacher made an example out of him, tallying on the blackboard how many hundreds of thousands those sorts of planes had killed. Though pages upon pages of bombers can become creepy, you did admire the way this boy ignored other people’s expectations of him. For instance, the expectation that the things you like to draw shouldn’t have killed a lot of people.
He once drew a fleet of AC-130 Spectres, one of the six deadliest planes in history, in the margins of your geometry notes.
The two of you decide, on the phone, to drive downtown to a well-known hotdog stand. His voice sounds deeper than you remember and already a little bored. You’re instructed to bring a friend and he’ll bring one too. The problem is you have two best friends at the time. He picks the three of you up in his mother’s minivan. His friend does not offer to vacate the passenger seat and due to the odd number, it’s unclear how the lines should be drawn, and who should be connected to whom, so for much of the evening, no one talks to anyone. At one point you tap the boy on the shoulder. “Are you still drawing those planes?” you ask. “No,” he says. What does it mean to like someone? You think you liked him better when he wasn’t there.
At a summer camp hosted by the local university, there are two boys who seem to like you. One boy is blond and other boy’s hair is black. The boy with blond hair likes you more which maybe is why he isn’t the one you like in return. When he looks at you, his eyes turn soft and needy, like he wants all sorts of uncomfortable things from you. He begins to follow you around. Once, he even follows you into the girl’s bathroom before he figures out where he is and retreats, his face reddening. The boy with black hair arm wrestles with you in the dorm hallway, which you enjoy, but at the final party, you have to slow dance with the boy with blond hair because he asks. “I really like you,” the blond boy says, tightening his arms around your waist until you feel hot and trapped. Thankfully the song ends and you rush out of the dance hall into the garden, where you spend the rest of the evening sitting alone on an uncomfortable stone bench. If this were a story instead of your life, the boy with black hair would appear to play a game of mercy. He doesn’t appear. It starts raining and your dress is ruined because it’s a stupid silk dress.
Both boys write you letters after the camp ends.
“Marry me,” writes the boy with black hair. He encloses a piece of string to knot around your finger. You hope this is what marriage will be like: a correspondence of letters with the occasional piece of string. Eventually he stops writing. You throw away the blond boy’s letters. The following summer, the boy with blond hair is there at the same camp again, only this time he has an actual girlfriend. They hold hands everywhere they go. Between classes, he pushes her up against the rough bricks of the campus buildings and, kissing her, sticks his fingers into her hair. You wonder if this is what he wanted to do with you.
“I thought you liked me,” you tell him when he accidentally bumps into you at the bagel bar.
The other boy in your Latin class looks as if he should not be taking Latin. He is tall, firstly—tall boys don’t take Latin at your school—and secondly he plays soccer, and soccer boys are known for taking German. He sits behind you because that’s where your teacher told him to sit, and when he sits down, his long legs stretch out around your chair, so you have a clear and constant view of his shoes. He has dated the same girl for the previous three years. They are planning on applying to all the same colleges. Every day this girlfriend waits for him outside the classroom and when he emerges with Catullus, or Virgil, or whoever it is tucked under his arm, she will tilt up her face and separate her lips, as if these two gestures are the most natural gestures in the entire world. Then he kisses her and she is not pretending to beam, she is actually beaming. It seems there are some mysterious instincts at work, instincts a lot of people—everybody?—possess, excluding you. It isn’t that you want to be this boy’s girlfriend, but rather you want to be that girl with those instincts.
Another boy, overweight, with sweaty arms, writes you a poem. He slips the poem into your locker then stands there watching while you fumble with the combination, then he continues to watch you while you read the poem. “I don’t think ‘like’ rhymes properly with ‘death,’” you point out. The next day he hands you a revision with stronger rhymes. Her eyes are blue and I am blue. / My likeness, do not bid me adieu…
Your best friend decides to attend the junior prom with a boy she thinks she likes “Remember? We were going downtown to an art movie that night. I already bought the tickets,” you remind her. “Sorry,” your friend says and spends the rest of the conversation sharing minute details about how it feels when the boy’s tongue slides into her ear. It appears your best friend is departing for the border of another country where you aren’t allowed to go even if you wanted to, and you are being left behind.
Despite the fact you aren’t going anywhere, your mom insists on taking you dress shopping, bribing you with the promise of new sandals. In the dressing room, she takes pictures which she says she might have to frame: you, in ruffles with an exploding silk flower pinned above your left breast. “You’re beautiful,” your mom says. “Look at you.” At home hanging on the family room wall, there is already a blown-up portrait of your older sister in purple taffeta and, beside that, a smaller picture of your brother in a rented tux posing beside his date.
“You know, this is what normal people do,” your mom has said.
“I know you could do this too if you tried,” she says.
“Can you put in a little more effort,” she says.
The blond boy from camp will re-enter the story briefly here. Hi! Send me a picture, he writes a few months later as if he still likes you. You send a picture of yourself where you’re sitting alone on top of a crumbling stone wall. He never writes you back, as if somehow he knew from looking at the strained shape of your lips.
Deciding it is time for a change, you cut off all your hair and bleach what little is left of it, and then you get a third piercing for the upper cartilage of your ear. This combination of things—the buzz cut, the bleach, the piercing—makes certain girls think you suddenly like girls. For example, in your photography class, a likewise short-haired girl with a third piercing identical to yours sits down beside you at the start of the semester. You ask her what kind of camera she has. She shows you her old Nikon with interchangeable lenses. It makes a satisfying click every time she presses the shutter release. After that, she never talks to you, she only stares and then begins taking pictures of you, usually pictures of the back of your head, which she presents to the class during crits. “Filled with a mysterious wanting,” your teacher says about her pictures.
The following summer you attend a different camp, this one for teens who are serious about writing, more specifically who are serious about writing thinly veiled stories about themselves. For instance, someone who might write down actual events from their life but they use the second person instead of the first in order to call it fiction. A brown haired boy at this camp says, “Let’s walk down to the lake,” and you walk down to the lake together, where he says, “Let’s look out at the water,” and you look out at the water. “You know,” he says, looking at the water, “I’ve never kissed anybody before.”
“Really?” you say, as if your situation is somehow different.
In front of you is the lake. You always like to tell people from out of town that this is a lake that might as well be an ocean. It’s that big. You can’t begin to see the end of it. A lot of people feel sorry for Midwesterners because they don’t have oceans but who needs them if you have a lake like this. Likewise a lot of people feel sorry for somebody who hasn’t been kissed as if they cannot imagine other possibilities. Like not kissing. The boy keeps turning toward you and clearing his throat. “Do you like me?” he finally asks. Every time he turns toward you, you make sure to be looking down at the seagulls that are shitting on the rocks below. You ignore his question. “I’m glad you’re not one of those boys who just wants to kiss every girl they see,” you say because, let’s face it, you are finally realizing that you do not want to kiss anyone. Such a realization makes your sad heart sweat. What kind of person doesn’t want to be kissed? Does it mean you don’t possess a real heart?
In Biology during the dissection of a dead frog, specifically at the point when you must separate the frog’s delicate skin flaps from its muscles, you discover your lab partner likes the same obscure band as you. And that he’s a runner, like you. “No way,” he says. “It’s true,” you say. You begin running after school with him through the nearby forest preserves. During these long runs, you talk about the music you both like, then, later, you talk about other things, like your families. He has two younger sisters and a mom who is obsessed with lasagna. He hates lasagna. You invite him over for dinner on one of his lasagna nights. “What a cutie,” your mom says after he leaves. He looks like somebody who should be in a band. He is, you find out, in a band. You watch him perform at a coffee shop near the mall where he dedicates a song to you. There are a lot of other girls at the show who look surprised when he speaks your name, not theirs, into the microphone. The song is about liking somebody but, at the same time, breaking one’s own heart, which you think you are learning how to do. The following Friday, he picks you up in his father’s truck and you go downtown to see a band from Alabama. The band is loud and also drunk and when you speak to the boy during these loud songs, you have to stand close and shout into his ear. You like this kind of closeness: the almost touching. He asks you to quiz him on the drive back about the organs of frogs to prepare for your upcoming biology test. The drive takes an hour. You are an expert on frog organs by the time you’re home.
Parked outside your house, the boy tugs his notebook from your hands and says your name again, only this time it doesn’t sound like your name, and he is leaning across the seat toward you. “Good luck with studying,” you hurriedly reply, unbuckling your seatbelt. What you really want to tell him is, Can’t this be enough? “Where are you going?” he asks. In your haste to get out of the truck, you open the door and fall out of your seat. “Don’t worry about me,” you say, brushing the loose grass off of your knees.
You both pass the test.
When the two of you were running on the mulch trails through the forest preserves, under the enormous oaks, talking, or not, even in the winter, when your hands turned numb, you had thought, This is the happiest I have been in a long time. On one particularly chilly run, he loaned you his gloves. He had to help put his gloves onto your hands because you couldn’t move your hands, you couldn’t feel anything in fact, and you remember thinking, This is everything I want right now.
“You’re a great friend,” he later tells you.
“Sure,” you say, disappointed that this is all he can imagine you being, as you have already imagined meaning something more to him. But you, of all people, should understand how the basic definition of dating involves kissing another person and, later, may require the slow removal of one’s clothes or at least a lot of rubbing. None of which you have the slightest urge to do. When you imagine meaning something more to him, you imagine sitting beside him on a bench, facing the same direction, while these clouds shaped like imaginary islands gather above your heads.
You wish the definition of dating was large enough to include you and him.
His family moves to Oregon because of his mom’s job. You write him letters that continue on for pages, letters that take you entire afternoons to write, containing sketches of the deer you see outside your window, and accounts of your weird dreams, and the diagrams of a cell. He writes you, in return, one-sentence postcards, then, one day, a CD arrives in the mail, and on it he is singing about a girl with frozen fingers in the woods, and the point of the song is that the girl is not alone, even if she thinks she is.
The new girl at your school happens to move there from Oregon. What a weird coincidence, you tell her, asking if she knows that boy in the band who moved out there. “You might not know this, but Oregon is a pretty big state,” the new girl patiently explains, and it’s as if your question has cemented an unintended intimacy between the two of you, because from that day forward, the new girl wishes to do everything with you. She attends the spring musical with you. She signs up for Latin Club with you (though she is taking French, not Latin). Though she’s allergic to cats, she volunteers with you at the Humane Society’s animal shelter on Saturday afternoons. “I think she likes you or something,” your best friend says.
“I have this idea,” the new girl tells you. “Let’s go to the quarry together next Sunday!” The quarry is the big make-out spot in your town. Even she must know what happens there. People either make out or they seem to drown. You say no but she won’t stop asking to go with you so finally you tell her, “Okay, but I’m bringing a friend. You should bring one too.” The new girl looks so disappointed, as if you have taken out her heart and eaten it. She does not bring a friend. At the quarry, she strips off her shirt in a single movement and dives in, bare chested, hollering out your name. It is a graceful dive. The next day, you remove your earring from your upper cartilage, though the hole never seals properly, leaving an unfortunate bump there in the skin.
You meet this next guy at your summer job as a temp for a garage door manufacturer. He is much older than you and important enough to possess a permanent secretary. “Listen, he hits on all the temps,” your supervisor warns but you don’t really care because you think you might like him. First of all, he looks like an older version of that boy who moved to Oregon, whom you still miss. Secondly, he laughs at your jokes, even the one about the garage door and the otter, which isn’t that funny. Besides, it is hard not to be flattered when he, lounging in your cubicle, unbuttons the top button of his suit, and as if there is nothing wrong with you—as if you are a girl with instincts!—he asks you to dinner.
You tell your mother you are going out with a friend.
“A friend who’s a boy?” your mom asks hopefully.
He takes you to a restaurant in Chinatown where everything, he assures you, is authentic, as if this is something you should care about. He does not allow you to look at a menu. “You are going to love this,” he says, motioning to a steamer basket of tender green dumplings that he ordered. After you’ve eaten most of the dumplings, he tells you, “I just have this feeling that you know how to read other people’s palms. Am I right?” It is a random and strange question, but you lie and tell him what he wants to hear: what a coincidence, you happen to read palms! “I knew it,” he says. “You look like that sort of girl.” He opens up his hand and takes your hand and he makes you stroke his palm with your fingers. You tell him how he is going to die shortly in a very memorable way.
“In that case,” he says, leaning toward you.
“Wait,” you try to say, leaning back in your chair, but perhaps he didn’t hear you because he kisses you anyway, forcing his wide tongue immediately into your mouth. A friend of yours described French kissing as the greatest thing to ever happen to her. She said it’s like free transport to another, better world, a world she dreamed about forever but now she gets to go, a world where there aren’t words.
This is not how it feels to you.
When he pulls away, as he begins to stroke the sensitive parts of your ear, you tell him not to kiss you again. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Instead of talking, he begins looking strangely across the table at you, like he’s debating whether or not you have a disease, and if you do have a disease, is it contagious. “Why do you think I asked you to dinner?” he says finally. “Go ahead. Take a wild guess. Do you think it was for your elegant conversation?” The check arrives a few minutes later. He makes you pay for half.
You give him the wrong address to drop you off at, a house four blocks away from your actual house. He kisses you again in the car one last time because the safety locks are on and you can’t open the passenger door. “Let me give you some parting words of advice,” he says before releasing the locks. “Learn how to be a better actor. Or actress. Whatever.” You begin kicking the door until he lets you out and you walk the four blocks home alone. The sky is dark and ugly. There isn’t even a moon. Your mother asks you if you walked home by yourself. “No,” you say, “my friend dropped me off.”
After several similar mishaps, you decide to take the garage door employee’s advice, which means learning how to act like you are someone other than yourself. This proves difficult but not impossible, the required progression of your teenage life. You pretend to like kissing or, more accurately, to like allowing yourself to be kissed, or fondled, or whatever it is they expect you to want. Because what story ends without at least one long and treasured kiss? While the rare person who mistakenly allowed themselves to reach a certain age without at least desiring such physical affections becomes only the punch line to a joke.
“Your mom doesn’t care?” the boy says as he shuts the door to your bedroom. “You have a cool mom.”
“Oh, you know,” you reply. You do not like how the boy has begun to smell when you’re alone with him or how, when sitting on your bed, his legs are splayed wide open. He rubs the spot on the bed right beside him like he is rubbing a girl’s skin, her shoulders or her back. You sit down on the reading chair in the corner. You are not doing a very good job of pretending today. He walks over to the reading chair and says, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but some people think you like girls.” Before you can respond, he leans down to kiss you. You keep your lips closed. He straightens up. “You’re not gay, are you? I mean, it’s fine if you are. But then I just shouldn’t be here. Unless you like girls and guys both?”
Honestly you have no idea what you are. You take a deep breath and kiss him back and you pretend, as you’ve done before, to like kissing him. He doesn’t seem to notice that you’re pretending. You bite his lip out of frustration and taste blood. That makes him kiss you harder until you really can’t breath.
Your friend tells you about how she crept with a boy she liked into his mother’s office, where he picked her up and set her on an enormous desk, then he took off her shirt and then, later, removed her skirt. When your friend tells you this, she is whispering, though you’re in her bedroom with the door shut. The boy kept the lights off the whole time. It was so lovely and it was so dark, your friend says, giggling, that sometimes it was difficult to locate the right body part. So many of your friends have begun telling these kinds of stories to you where they are overtaken by this wild and physical joy which appears to be out of your reach. As if they’re part animal now with pleasurable appetites. As if someone, at night, has been transforming all your friends into animals with these pleasurable appetites but that person forgot to transform you, so you are left behind shouting into the wind for them to not leave you behind.
“You liked it?” you whisper back, attempting to sound interested.
“God, what do you think?”
“I hate kissing.”
“What are you talking about?” she says.
You had been lying beside your friend on your back, the two of you staring up at the ceiling fan circling pointlessly above you. Now your friend rolls over onto her side, a puzzled look on her face.
She says, “Come on, tell me.”
You walk one night around your neighborhood with a girl who says she likes you, the girl in your year who wears that velvet patchwork hat which usually hides her eyes. You walk with her for an hour, the moon and the Little Dipper and Mars presumably somewhere above you both, though the sky is covered with clouds so you can’t see anything but clouds, until finally the girl says, “You’re wearing me out,” and she collapses onto a park bench. “I think the park is closed,” you say, pointing to the sign. She throws her hat at the sign and tugs you down beside her, resting her hand against your face, more specifically, against your left cheek.
“You’re warm,” she says. “Are you nervous?”
“No,” you answer truthfully. A hopeful energy vibrates through you. The hope that you’ll enjoy this. Please, you are repeating over and over in your mind. Please. Please. Because it would be easier to be part of a story whose plot you already know, where falling for somebody looks like a kiss. When the girl kisses you, she tastes like coffee and onions. Her tongue, when it moves into your mouth, is the most disappointing invitation. You feel something bright leaving you. A possibility. This isn’t what you want either. Which means you are what? She kisses you again at the park and you let her, and once more at the all-night diner, where she kisses you while leaning in across the booth, a position surprisingly uncomfortable for both of you, especially since she is, at the same time, also groping at your knee. You put up with the kissing until the waitress strides over to where the two of you sit and proceeds to have a coughing fit, at the same time dropping off your check for the dual milkshakes and a plate of fries.
This is the time when all your friends are either in love or they claim to be, and you find yourself one afternoon wondering when, if ever, you will get to be in love too. At one point you ask this question aloud.
“You want to be in love with who exactly?” one friend responds. “I didn’t think you liked people that way.”
“Yeah,” another friend says, “I don’t think you can love somebody if you don’t want to, you know, make out with them.”
A third friend says, “Shut up. Kissing has nothing to do with it. You’re in love when you find somebody who understands you. All the parts of you. You just have to find them, okay?”
You ask, “What if there’s nobody else like you in the entire world?”
“This world’s a really big place. Trust me. It’ll happen.”
You begin officially dating a boy during your final year of high school. He is fine. The two of you talk about the graphic novels he reads where characters are never what they seem. These are the only books he likes.
“Why does everybody in those books have secret identities?” you ask.
“Because secret identities are fun,” he says.
“Not really,” you say.
When you are dating this boy, your mother stops asking why you aren’t dating anybody. Which, at least, is one positive.
You pretend you like lying beside this boy on the couch in his basement where there aren’t windows and it smells like mold and underwear. You pretend you like lying on top of him in your bedroom, where his hips poke into you as he waits for you to touch him in the way he is telling you to touch him. You also pretend, in the forest preserve parking lots, that you like what he is doing to you.
At some point he figures it out.
“What is wrong with you?” he finally asks. “Why are you just lying there? I’m going to lie here for once and you have to do everything. Okay, go.” You are in the back of his car again. It’s autumn. All of the dead leaves are falling from the trees. You have no idea what to do. Your best friend said when you don’t know what to do in situations like this one, you just turn your brain off and your body will take over. So you turn your brain off. You still don’t know what to do.
“Come on, don’t you like me?” he says.
“I’m waiting,” he says.
“You should see a therapist,” he says.
“I am so fucking bored,” he says.
It’s not that you never want to be touched.
It’s that you don’t want to be touched in the way that everyone else seems to expect you to want.
Here is one example.
After spraining your hamstring during track repeats, you are assigned a physical therapist, a man at least two decades older than you with a mustache. You like him. More specifically, you liked how he touched you in a way impersonal but tender, appreciating how your muscle interacts with your bone, like you could be anyone with muscle and bone. “I’m going to touch your hips to see how they rotate,” he told you then he did. There was an irresistible lack of need in his touch. He didn’t want any more from you except for you to lie there very still, which you were doing, which you wanted to do, as he felt, with a great curiosity, how your hips moved when you bent then straightened your leg. His fingers had already followed your hamstring, beginning at the back of your knee all the way on up, and also he had cradled your ankle and cupped your knee. When he touched you, you did not lose yourself, or get swept away, or begin either drowning or moaning, which is how your friends variously described being touched. You did not want more.
He said, “I’m going to press down on your hip.”
Then, “Good.”
You liked the closeness of his hand cupped around your ankle.
For a while, you pretend not to like anybody. Instead, you read books about people liking each other. There don’t seem to be other kinds of books. In these books, two characters like each other, then they kiss, then they either have sex or at least want to have sex, then, by the end of the book, either one of them dies or they fall further in love. This happens in every book you read so you stop reading books. At the same time, you decide you are tired of pretending.
You meet a boy you think you like. “I don’t want to kiss you,” you say. The boy goes away.
You meet another boy you could like. “I don’t want to kiss you,” you say.
“That’s okay. I can wait,” the boy says. “No rush.”
“No, I mean forever. I will never want to kiss you,” you say. “Kissing makes me want to vomit. I hate it.”
“Oh, I get it. It’s like a game,” the boy says. He tries to kiss you. You tell him to go away.
Up until now this story has been pretty much true, but there is the chance you are about to make up what comes next, the last part. Not because it can’t happen but because it hasn’t happened to you yet. But it’s probably okay to make up a little bit of this story, in particular this last part because in a story that deals with desire, many people prefer happy endings, and happy endings often look like two people happily kissing, or at least having the happy memory of a nice kiss. If you can’t have that, and you can’t, then let’s at least not end the story with you, alone, wondering whether someone will ever come along and like you despite—or for?—whatever it is you are.
So here comes the happy ending.
Are you ready?
Believe in it.
You meet another boy you think you like. “I don’t enjoy kissing people,” you say. “That means all people, including you.”
The boy shrugs.
“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t go away. In fact he continues looking at you as if he already knows you. You think he must not understand.
“That includes sex. I don’t like sex either,” you say. “With you or anyone. Or people touching me in that way. This is never going to change.”
“Whatever. I still like you,” the boy says, squeezing your hand then letting your hand go.
The boy had walked home from school with you and now you both are standing at the end of your block. You are wishing there is some sort of script to follow because, honestly, you have no idea what to do next with this boy. All the books you have read and the movies you’ve seen do not apply. All the stories of your friends are useless here as well. What does a love scene look like if kissing is not involved? As if on cue, across the street, two deer bound into a neighbor’s yard and begin devouring the day lilies. The deer are all over the neighborhood now, herds of them. A lot of people say it has gotten out of hand and something drastic needs to be done. It used to be that no one could believe it when they spotted a deer. It used to be like glimpsing a unicorn through a portal.
“Look at that,” the boy says, touching your shoulder and pointing. At the sound of his voice, one of the deer looks up in your direction.
