The Height of Rudeness

Ryder texted me this right after I got home from school.

'Dad wants you over for dinner. You think you can come?'

To say that I was horrified by Mr. Black would be a vast understatement. I always had adverse reactions when communicating with big, stern people... two in particular were the males in the Black family. My first few contacts with Ryder weren't what you'd call heartwarming or auspicious. They were bleak at its best. Ryder called me a cat and I fainted at the sight of him. It was a symphony of fails.

But then the older version of Ryder, which was his father, seemed to inject a helluva lot more of anxiety into me. Gregory Black was bigger than Ryder (who was standing at a good five foot eleven), he was heavier than Ryder (who approximately weighed 160), and he liked scowling even more than Ryder (which he did in quarter-hourly basis).

Plus, he didn't like the way I talked.

My phone rang once again. I didn't have anyone else to text so I knew that it was from Ryder.

'You can say 'no'. The man will eat you up.'

And another came in the next minute.

'But it'll be nice of you if you come.'

Now I wasn't sure what Ryder would like me to say. Yes or no? Dinner or not?

And then, he gave me the answer,

'Alright. Can you PLEASE have dinner at my house tonight? My Dad wants to see you.'

I had to gobble down a few chocolate bars from my treasure box before I mustered enough craziness to text him back a 'yes'.

-

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At five o clock, even though my mom planned to make Corn soup (a must for Thursdays) and celery salad, I had to tell her that I couldn't join dinner with the whole family because Mr. Black beckoned for me.

"That's great! I'm in the mood for the greasiest, fattiest pizza! With lots of onions," mom responded, a little too happily if I may add. When he heard about this, my brother actually pumped his fist and shouted a thank you towards the window.

"Thanks, Mr. Black! I've always hated corns and today we can finally eat pizza!"

To which, Mr. Black responded,

"Mary! Mary, don't cook the meat loafers! Kid will only eat Corn on Thursdays!"

Oh well, at least I would still getting my C-lettered food today.

"So how is it going?" Mom asked me.

"What's going?"

"You and Ryder."

I shrugged. "It's good. I like him a lot."

"You're going to eat dinner with his parents. It's a big deal."

"He almost always eat breakfast with us and it's not a big deal for us."

"Oh, honey," Mom pulled me into an embrace. "Ryder has a rocky relationship with his parents. The fact that he invited you to have dinner with them is an indication of him taking the next step with you."

"Um.. But, but it's actually Mr. Black who invited me."

"Really?" Mom was surprised at that revelation. "Gregory, did you invite my daughter to have dinner with your family?"

Mr. Black's reply came fast. "Yes!"

I guess I started to really like the whole 'thin-walls-no-privacy' thing. It brough 'being closer to your neighbor' to another level.

"Don't chew her up! If she comes home crying, I'll throw a plunger to your head, cancer or not!"

"I know how to treat my guests! Now stop shouting, woman, my whole head is spinning!"

I could actually hear Mrs. Black slapping him, although the part where she slapped him was still a mystery. "How many times did I tell you that saying 'woman' is disrespectful, you manpig?"

"Mom, is Mr. Black really gonna chew me up?"

"It's an idiom, Dear. Remember what I taught you before?" Mom smiled at me. "It means I don't want him to censure you. He's an uptight big bastard, that man."

"I'm really scared of him," I admitted. "I think he only calls me for dinner so that I can be dinner."

At my deepest fear, Mom actually laughed heartily. "No, April. No, he won't do that. You make Ryder way too happy for him to actually turn you to be his dinner. He won't do that to his son."

"But Ryder doesn't look too happy, I often see him more frustrated than happy."

"You do realize that dealing with you is harder than to deal with other people, right?" Mom asked. I nodded, even though it pained me to admit so. One thing I liked about my mom was how she told it as it is. I couldn't understand people who said the opposite of what they meant, and then hope for me to actually understand what they really was thinking. It was like forcing me to be able to code a fully-functioning website just because I was familiar with numbers.

"But dealing with Ryder is also hard. He's touchy-feely, easily angered, and he's too full of... of feelings. Sometimes I think he has a mountain of feelings just pent up beneath those tattoos."

"You know, those kind of qualities are actually what girls are looking for in a man," Mom said with a detached expression. "And boy, that kid is good looking."

I nodded shyly.

"Anyway, his looks aside," there was a crease of wrinkles appeared on the corner of Mom's lips as she smiled. "Just try harder. Try harder to understand him. With all the things going on on his life, you need to be there for him."

"I keep trying, but in the end, I seem to upset him more than comfort him. I can't seem to know what to tell him."

"Oh, honey," Mom opened her arms and waited until I snuggled closer to her. Mom really liked being hugged. As we stayed silent for the next three minutes and three seconds, I asked her.

"You really don't know the solution to my problem, do you?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't."

"I knew it."

"You're being too brutal with your honesty. Five dollars on the mean jar, April."

-

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Ryder walked to my house and picked me up at exactly seven. I had put on my nicest dress and Mom had armed me with a touch of her coral lipstick. The lip statement didn't go unnoticed by Ryder, of course.

"Nice color," he said. "Will it come off to my lips when I kiss you?"

"I hope not, I like the color, too."

My dad, who was already home, coughed to remind us of his presence. "I'm here."

"Hi, Mr. Hale," Ryder greeted him, unfazed by our previous flirting. "Thank you for letting April eat at my house today."

Dad only let out a reluctant smile. Ever since he found out that Ryder had slept in my room for a whole month, he never really warmed up to him. But at least he wasn't chasing him down with a shotgun, which was the standard procedure of most fathers with a teenage daughter.

"Okay, so how should we do this," Ryder bit on his nails on the way from my house to his.

"What constitutes as dinner? Food, table talk, dessert? In my family, occasional arguments are compulsory, by the way."

"Don't worry about the argument part, because it's the integral part of my familial assembly."

"What kind of argument do you usually have?" I asked. "You know, so that I can... uh, prepare my answer."

"April. Are you actually dealing this the way you deal with Corrine and Marcy's scientific debates?"

"Yes...?"

There was a deafening silence that lasted far longer than I'd like it to last.

"Then we're going to need more time," Ryder announced, before he quickly phoned his house. When his mother picked it up, he told her, "Mom, April and I need to go to a cafe to buy dessert for later. Can you stall Dad for another thirty minutes?" Ryder stopped talking as I heard his mother gave him her answer. "Sweet. I'll see you later. Remember to keep every food starts with a C."

"So, which cafe are we going?" I asked him.

He looked at me like I was growing a second head. "No, we're just going to the park and rehearse dinner."

When we arrived, Ryder didn't waste time for anything else and immediately started. "Most likely, my father would ask something about you." He put a hand under his chin. "Maybe he'd ask about your grades at school. Or what activities that you do in your freetime."

"Oh, that's easy! I mostly get A, but sometimes I got Bs on my english papers because I kept misspelling things. And I like to watch TVs and read fanfictions about said TVs and I recently developed a strong addiction towards My Little Pony because it's actually a social satire-"

Ryder's hand touched my shoulder. "Now," he began. "We need to work on that intense, one-sided conversations."

I literally had to bit my lip to stop myself from talking. After making sure that no word about My Little Pony would come out, I trusted myself to speak. "How do I do it?"

"Just keep all sort of information limited to three sentences," Ryder advised. "And maybe not talk about fantasy horses."

"But why?"

"My father thinks that having autism is like a free ticket for high-intelligence, sort of like being a computer who absorbs all information because computers don't need to socialize."

My chest hurt so bad hearing this. "Your father needs to put a lot of money in the Mean Jar."

Ryder laughed, but then the laugh died fast as he moved on to the next subject. "He will probably ask about our relationship, too."

"And I should probably not ruin it by saying that I fainted the first time I saw you outside the house, right?"

"You should probably not mention that."

"This is so hard," I said. "Can I mention about his illness? I feel so bad about him. I read that people who are ill often act out because they feel like they're being treated unfairly by the world."

"That's not the case with my father, though. He's always insufferable, even before he was sick. The numbered days only revealed more of his inner ugly."

I didn't know how to answer that. I could deal with the pain of being embarrassed or humiliated, or even, with some practice with Ryder, being too intensely overwhelmed with fondness. But I never knew how to react towards people who were doomed to death.

"Can I talk about my theories about Hell, then?"

Ryder raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. "You think my father's going to hell?"

Oops.

"Jesus Christ," Ryder elongated the names. "Jesus Christ."

"Do you know that your mother also repeats everything twice when she's upset?" I pointed out, mostly to ease off the tension.

My attempt, however, made Ryder even madder than before. His whole face was red and if I weren't his girlfriend, I felt like he was close into doing something that would involve his knuckles.

"Need to also tone down the bluntness," he managed to say that calmly, although the slight tremor on his voice still couldn't quite sheath his anger. "Damn it, sometimes I wished you were normal."

His words pierced my chest. But as we sat there in silence, the more his words made sense to me. With all the things going on in Ryder's life, he needed someone who could provide him comfort and sympathy, not someone who would say something totally unrelated to whatever he was dealing with.

"I know," I said. "Me, too."

"It's just not fair, okay? I always try to be careful. Of you, of your feelings. And there you are, just speaking whatever it is you're thinking, without any care of me. Sometimes it's cute, but now there are times when it's frustrating; it hurts, sometimes it makes me doubtful if you actually care about me"

I could only stare at my lap, because staring at his face intensified the eruption inside my chest. I watched as Ryder's hands went through a lot of phases: being balled, shaking imperceptibly, and then opened wide and approached me. I very nearly screeched because of the element of surprise, but when his fire of a palm reached my knee, it was with slowness and tenderness.

"I might need to go away from here when he's gone," his voice came. "Dad actually called you because he wanted to talk about that."

"You... you will ... go?"

"Me and my mother decided to sell the house after that. Dad doesn't have much time left. And we've talked a lot about this. Living there won't be... it wont' be good for us, especially since a lot of bad things happened there."

"But-but you've been there for...for ten years," my voice came out one by one, with a pause for each word. "I saw you ... since you were... a toddler."

"And I saw you mini you, too," Ryder said. "You were a cute kid."

"You too, before you grow up and have a perpetual sad face."

The sad face that I was talking about materialized. "I'm just not happy, April."

"And leaving... will make you happy?"

"We'll live in my grandmother's house," Ryder said. "It's just three hours away, I can still drive over to you and we can still hang out."

I tried to think this through. Maybe I could try to drive, too, although the thought of putting myself behind the wheel and potentially kill someone and myself gave me the urges to pee my pants. Or I could save up weekly for train tickets. Or maybe I could pay Quentin to drive me.

But then all plans seemed to just flop when compared to our current situation now, with Ryder just ten feet away from me, and we could see each other whenever we wanted to. I never liked change and this kind of change was the most inconvenient of all.

"And we-we're going to talk about this on dinner?" I inquired.

"Yeah, my Dad was especially concerned that you wouldn't be able to take it."

I shook my head. "I can't take it."

"Think about me, okay? I can't live there anymore. I haven't been able to for years! I'd rather sleep on someone else's floor than on my own bed. I hate that house."

"Then I don't want Mr. Black to die," I said. "I don't want him to die. If he dies, you'll leave. He can't die, because you can't leave. "

"That's not how it works."

And he was right. As much as I didn't want to admit it, it wasn't how it worked.

-

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Dinner with the Blacks went pretty smoothly. Every food started with a C, and even though me and Ryder didn't bring home any dessert (Ryder said that there was nothing made of Chocolate or Cheese, and all was left was spongecake, although there was a flaw on his logic since Cake always started with a C), Mrs. Black didn't question us much about it.

Ryder was right about his speculations about what we were going to talk about. Mr. Black asked me about my grades at school, and my answer seemed to satisfy him. He didn't look as imposing as he used to, especially since he started to cough every five seconds and he could never really straighten his back. When he spoke, his voice was merely whispery, and it wasn't intentional either. It was the best that he could do.

And when the Topic came, I still hadn't chosen on how to deal with it.

"Ryder and I might leave the town," Mrs. Black said. I had just realized how very similar Ryder and his mother were when both of them had a scowl on their nicely shaped mouths. "I hope you're okay with that."

And I knew what Ryder and my mom would have expected me to say. They would expect me to say 'it's ok' and that 'I can deal with it' and that 'we can work it out', because I knew Ryder would try his hardest to make it work out. He had it in him. The drive and the determination. I could only have one look into his face to know that he was going to try the hardest, even though being with me crushed him in more ways than one.

And yet I couldn't say those words. Instead, I looked at Mr. Black, took in his fragile body and very thin wrists and the popping veins around his jaw. I looked at him, and I said to him.

"I hate you. If you're not dying, Ryder wouldn't have to leave. If you're not such a meanie to him, he wouldn't hate the house so much. "

It was the meanest thing that I'd ever said to anyone, and I felt so bad about it that I had to run to the corner of the house (because I didn't know where the bathroom was) to retch whatever it was inside my stomach. After I spilled my guts all over the carpeted floor (God, why it had to be carpeted? Now I felt twice as guilty), I ran away, back into my house. I wasn't sure how many times my former etiquette teacher would spank me if she were there. I'd probably looking for 20 to 25. Maybe even more. It really was the height of rudeness.

I could hear Mr. Black saying, "Kid hates me so much she pulled the classic 'puke and go'."

"Good thing I love her, or else you'll be screaming right into her ears," Ryder said.

"Damn right."