Read More: A brief Q&A with Beston Barnett

It’s a long walk home from school, and hot. When I finally get to our trailer, I am in no mood to find my mom on the carpet in her bedroom playing with a bunch of goobs.

“Goobs, Mom?”

“Aren’t they funny?” she says.

I stand in the door and stare. There are about two dozen of them bumbling around, roughly softball-sized, some on four legs and some on two. No eyes, no facial features, and a bit clumsy, like animate beanbags made of seamless white cotton. Three are under the dresser scavenging through the dust bunnies, one is nuzzling Mom’s knee. I guess I should be amazed, but I’m not. I’m annoyed and a little worried.

“I’m making cheese toast,” I say.

“Thanks, baby.”

“My name’s Lydia.”

“Mmn hmmn.”

I’ve never seen actual goobs before—not real live ones, anyway, not walking around—but I recognize them right away. They’re from an old-fashioned children’s book we used to read together. By old-fashioned, I mean that my great-grandparents probably read it to my grandparents. It’s called The Goobs Run Amok. The goobs are these cute little white cartoon blobs that rampage cheerfully through an elegant house messing things up and more or less defining bad manners. Usually at the end of a few rhyming stanzas, the Littlest Goob points out the error of their ways, and the rest of them are shamed into putting things right. Straightening the napkins, putting the galoshes in a row, spooning the soup without slurping: that kind of old-fashioned. Five-year-old me wanted to be the Littlest Goob. It’s particularly hilarious that I was given this sort of early indoctrination when you consider the desperate state of housekeeping in the trailer my mom and I currently share.

“Mom, we’re out of cheese again. I thought you were going to the store?”

The fridge is not what you’d call well-stocked. I start pulling out drawers.

My older brother left about nine months ago, straight out of high school and into the loving arms of the marines. On the plus side, I finally got our cramped bunkroom all to myself. But on the minus, something weird changed with Mom. A month after he moved out, she lost her job and her car. I’m still not sure what happened to the car, but from a phone call I overheard, I gather the job was lost because she either slept with her boss or didn’t sleep with him, both firing offences apparently. I fantasized about tazing the bastard for weeks.

Since then, I don’t think she’s held down a job for more than a few days. Dishes pile up, bills pile up, and her fifteen-year-old daughter—me: Lydia—is just counting the days until she can move out. I do try to look after her, but I don’t see why I should be expected to have some happy-go-lucky attitude about it. I’m not of Lydia of Green Gables. I want out. In my defense: it’s hard to feel all cozy and mothered with a woman whose every other thought is about the drink she’s not having. Mom is six years sober—and, yes, I’m proud, I am, really!—but sometimes I still feel like, take an effing drink already!

So, all that is par for the trailer park, I guess. I don’t know, it’s not so bad. I’ve got a phone and a boyfriend I maybe like. I don’t hate school. But for the last month or so, I’ll come home to find Mom still in her bathrobe, leafing through some old comic book of my brother’s or binge-watching these inane kids’ shows we used to like. Shorty and Friends, Things That Go Bang, Kangaroo Island. There’s something so pathetic about her disappearing into this stuff again. So regressive, is the word. And when I catch her watching one of these kids’ shows, she’ll look at me all wistful and moony, like a deflated party balloon.

When she does that—when she looks up at me as if it was so much better being a kid—I can’t handle it. I feel like two great storm fronts seethe up within me and collide. One is a cold soft sadness and the other a searing anger, and they’re so huge you wouldn’t think they’d fit inside me.

So, no, I wasn’t all that tickled to find my mom playing with the goobs.

“Mom?” Usually the smell of toast will get her attention. “I put on some soup too.”

Chicken Vegetable: a real square meal.

Peering back into the bedroom, I find her belly-down on the carpet, making a bridge from her forearms for the goobs to march over. They’re like a vaudeville comedy act. Bumping into each other, changing directions, domino-ing down the bridge of her arms and tumbling across the floor. The ones that stand upright look a bit like small bowling pins with stubby legs. The four-legged ones are more like tiny plump elephants. I can’t pick out which one is the Littlest Goob, but they’re all cute, I guess. Mom is rapt.

“Soup. Toast. Mom? Jesus, you need to get a life or a boyfriend or something.”

“Okay, thanks, baby. I’m coming.”

But she doesn’t get up off the floor.

The Goobs will, the Goobs won’t
The Goobs are partial to a cuddle
But most of all, they love a muddle
So if you’d be a Goob, don’t!

I get used to the goobs after a few weeks, but that doesn’t mean I like them. I find them snuggling with my mom watching TV; a third of them fall off the couch and go wobbling around like drunk uncles in teeny sumo suits when I slam the door. Sometimes they pile into a teetering scrum so they can do things like go through the cereal boxes looking for prizes and spill shit everywhere. Mom claims to find this endearing. While I’m waiting for the Littlest Goob to materialize and snap Mom out of her regression into pre-school, I do the bare minimum: clean two bowls and two spoons, get food on the table, retreat to my bunk.

Maybe it’s a theme in my life. Regression Runs Amok. For instance, Daniel’s friends are all into this underground webcomic called /fLux. Daniel is my boyfriend, and “slash flux” (that’s how you say it) is the super-weird adventures of a team of heroes that work together to keep the world Safe From Entropy. They are a towering goddess named Ilmr, a boy named Owen, his cat Babs, a flea on the cat with the unlikely name Jumpy, and, residing in the flea, a mitochondrion called Excelsior. In a few special strips, orders of magnitude even higher or lower are explored: Ilmr’s titanic father flies through on a supernova, or an electron zipping around a sodium atom in Excelsior’s outer membrane spins free and wreaks havoc. The goddess and the cat have this super-hot romantic tension thing going. The flea gets on everyone’s nerves. Their regular enemies are manifestations of physics theorems: the Maxwellian, the Four Horsemen of Thermodynamics, and the big baddie Gravitomagnetron: “G-Mag,” for short. My favorite character is a mysterious green-robed woman who embodies the Uncertainty Principle; whenever she shows up, things get interesting.

In the latest, G-Mag—wielding a solar flare—has put the giant goddess Ilmr in a coma, and the gang can’t figure out how to wake her.

So, yeah, it’s weird and dark and cool. But it’s also just a comic strip. Not something I feel like coming all swoony fangirl over.

And because I refuse to be a gushing member of the slash flux cult, Daniel’s friends don’t approve of us. Like today in Western Civ class, I can see a new installment must have posted online because all Daniel’s friends are cradling their phones under their desks and looking intense. When I raise my eyebrows at him, Daniel smiles, then scribbles something and holds it up: a lowercase “h” with a horizontal bar through it, symbol of Planck’s reduced constant and of Uncertainty Girl. (She’s nameless in the webcomic though she has this green “h-bar” thing on her robe. It’s cool. I have an h-bar pin on my backpack. So, yeah, okay, I’m a fan, I just don’t gush.) When I give Daniel the thumbs up, I spy his friend Jonas scowling at us.

After school, everyone’s milling around getting picked up by their parents or meeting to go to the mall or the library or whatever. Daniel and I are sidling towards each other, very nonchalant, saying hi to friends from class or laughing at jokes, in the full but unacknowledged expectation that we will go off alone together and kiss for hours behind the sports field wall. We’ve done it before, and I know Daniel doesn’t have soccer practice this afternoon. I’m chill about it, sure, but even though we’ve indulged in five or six of these kissing sessions, I still feel fluttery.

Here comes Daniel with his backpack swung over one shoulder, and then here comes Jonas, and Jonas wants Daniel to come play ultimate with the other guys, and Daniel gives me an apologetic shrug, like, Sorry, Honey, Gotta Bring Home the Bacon! And off he goes, and me, the desperate housewife, left standing there feeling stupid.

Well, that sucks.

Look, Daniel’s a cool guy. He’s good-looking and smart, and he’s nice when we’re alone. It’s not only kissing, though there’s a lot of that, but we talk about stuff, even sometimes about heavy stuff like our families or our futures. But I don’t completely trust him. I don’t think he stands up for me with his friends. I mean, I don’t think he would put me down himself, but I don’t think he would come to my defense either. Maybe that’s just me, maybe that’s my issues, I don’t know.

I head home by myself, reading the new slash flux on my phone and letting the flutters die away.

Uncertainty Girl agrees to try and help cure the coma of the goddess Ilmr by entering the quantum zone of her god-neurons and eavesdropping on her dreams. She finds Ilmr’s damaged mind lost in the childhood memory of a snowstorm. Returning, Uncertainty Girl describes the screaming wind of the dream, the white static of the snow, and the intense feeling of having no one: no parents, no rescuers. I couldn’t find a way through, says Uncertainty Girl, shivering and her green robe still wet with snow. In the final panel, Babs (the cat with the super-hot romantic tension thing) yowls back at her, This is your fault!

It’s not my favorite installment.

When I get home, I stop at the screen door, surprised by the sound and smell of cooking. I can see Mom is in her accustomed spot in front of the TV. What’s going on?

“Mom?”

She gives me a spacey, kittenish look.

At first when I come in, I think a man is standing in front of the stove. A big lumpy guy wearing a suit made of pillowcases maybe, standing there mashing potatoes with a fork. It smells like something meaty is baking in the oven. I watch him add a pat of butter to the potatoes. For a giddy moment, I think this unexpected scene of domesticity might be my brother home for a long weekend, all grown up, here to take charge and straighten us out.

The lumpy man turns and nods at me, and it’s like the room comes suddenly into focus. He’s a pile of goobs. Somehow they’ve organized themselves into legs and torso and arms and head, and they’re balancing in my kitchen, adding salt to the mashed potatoes. I don’t know how to react; I just stand there gulping air like a hooked guppy.

Mom brushes over. She puts a feather-light hand on my shoulder as she passes, then leans against the countertop in her bathrobe looking at the goobs and then at me.

With a cautious, pleased expression, she says, “Lydia, this is my friend Bob,” exactly like a middle-aged mom in a soap opera introducing her troubled daughter to the new step-dad.

I’m flummoxed. I could flip out and stomp around and slam things, but I’m so flummoxed that a kind of dream logic takes hold, and I go passively along as Mom clears the table in front of the TV and the goobs bring out plates of meatloaf and potatoes and salad from a bag.

“Go ahead and eat, baby. It won’t bite.”

Goob-Bob is sitting mutely, moving the food around on his plate. Obviously he doesn’t eat; they don’t have mouths. I imagine for a moment that the meatloaf is a soup of bugs, wriggling over each other and spilling over the rim. But, no, it’s just meatloaf. Too ketchup-y, but meatloaf.

Mom: “Isn’t Bob a good cook?”

Mom: “It’s nice to sit around the table together like this.”

Mom: “So, tell us about your day, baby.”

Watching my mother read from this script of responsible parenting is the worst. It’s not an act she’s ever bothered to put on for me before; she’s performing for Goob-Bob. They/he/it sit looking attentively at the both of us; I can see the little beanbag goobs that make up its shoulder shift against one another. Used tissues are piled by one leg of the couch and a loose swamp of unopened mail is stuffed under the table. Mom’s hair is a mess, her bathrobe is hanging half open. It’s always so damn hot in the trailer. We’re like motionless flies stuck on yellowing fly-paper.

Could she be having sex with the goobs?

Somehow—though I’m queasy and it feels like I’m seeing the table from a great height—I finish what’s on the end of my fork and go close myself in my bunk.

Is the pantry a mess or the picture askew?
Are the books from the library far overdue?
Have the neighbors complained that the yard’s all a’clutter
Or has somebody smeared the best china with butter?
Then Grandpa hoots with a mischievous grin:
“The Goobs—of course—they’re at it again!”

Over the next weeks, I deal with the situation by ignoring it. Bob makes breakfast in the mornings, and I pretend not to see the stack of pancakes on my way out. Bob sinks into my brother’s old spot on the couch to watch cartoons with Mom, and I leave the room. When she pats Bob’s hand or gives me one of her new long-suffering-but-well-intentioned-parent looks, I want to throw up. But I learn a coping mechanism from the coma of the slash flux goddess: whenever my mother speaks, I drown her out with the static of Ilmr’s snowstorm. I picture myself in a freezing wind and let the roaring white noise overtake her voice. I manage to keep from screaming.

Some therapist somewhere could argue that Goob-Bob is the imaginary friend Mom needs right now, but, no, the whole thing is sick, and I have no idea how to talk to her. She’s not getting better: she’s just going from depressed to delusional. And Bob is not all there. Sometimes he seems to de-animate and become a pile of lifeless little white pillows propped on the couch like an overweight scarecrow. At other times, bits of him go wandering off on their own. One afternoon, I see three of the goobs that make up Bob’s right foot outside playing around with the neighbor’s cat while Bob is in the kitchen chopping onions.

In other news of the weird this week, slash flux fandom is blowing up over the latest installment.

While the gang was researching possible cures for god-coma, Uncertainty Girl met secretly with the Zeroth Horseman of Thermodynamics—one of the bad guys—and suggested that their best chance to kill Ilmr was now, while she was in a coma, by throwing her into an approaching wormhole.

“I’ve known all along she was a double agent,” says Jonas.

We are hanging out in the playground on Friday after school. I stuck around through their ultimate game (where else was I going to go?), so I’m an uninvited participant in the discussion afterwards. Daniel and I are sitting together, but not together together, and anyway, he’s all sweaty.

“Playing one side against the other.”

“Yeah, but she’s always like that.”

“Sowing discord, maybe, but not pitting the ranks against each other.”

“She wouldn’t side with the Four Horsemen,” I say, “She’s too smart for that.”

Jonas calls me out. “So what’s your theory?”

“Well, the edges of a wormhole are a bit like the event horizon around a black hole, right? Everything’s uncertain there, just on the edge. So maybe she has a trick up her sleeve.”

“Oh, come on!” Jonas actually sniggers. He might as well have said, What do you know about science, you small-brained female?

I roll my eyes at him, by which I mean, So you read Einstein’s Wikipedia page, you’re still a dick.

I wish I could say that Daniel backs me up at this point, but he doesn’t. And the thing is, it’s his idea. We’d been talking yesterday in our spot by the wall—talking and kissing—when he mentioned this idea about the uncertainty principle and how it effects molecules on the event horizon. We talked about what that might mean for a bit, and then he said, “You know how you never see Uncertainty Girl’s face? She’s always got that green hoodie on and just shadows for eyes. But when I think of her, I picture you. Like, if she took off that hood, I would see your face there.”

I consider myself to be a tough girl and totally immune to flattery, but after that, our kissing was a lot more intense.

So it’s lame that Daniel says nothing. I glance sideways at him, but he’s spinning the frisbee on his finger. He flails, loses balance, the frisbee careens off, it hits one of the other boys on the knee cap, and they all crack up. I’m surrounded by goobs, I think, walking home.

I can’t help feeling like I don’t matter to anyone.

When I get back to the trailer an hour later, sweat plasters my hair to my neck. The kitchen/living/dining room is blessedly empty. I drop my backpack, shrugging aching shoulders. I want a shower so badly. On the table in front of the TV, moistening a summer fashion catalog, is a tall glass of iced lemonade. It’s like an oasis in the desert. A lemonade mirage. I pick it up, take a drink, then another.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Mom coos as she comes in from her bedroom, trailing the Goob Man. “Bob made fresh lemonade!”

I’m caught red-handed.

“Mm-mmm,” I say. My eyes follow two goobs that have left the main body to explore a crumpled paper bag in the corner with a french fry or two left in it. That bag must have been there for months, since before Mom lost her car. Neither Bob nor my mom acknowledge these errant goobs. The bigger one loses interest and rejoins Bob’s left foot; the other comes bumbling towards me.

“Well, aren’t you going to say thank you for the lemonade, baby? Say thank you to Bob.”

I think My name’s Lydia automatically, though I don’t speak because I’m trying to do that thing where I drown out my mom’s phony-maternal voice with Ilmr’s snowstorm. It’s not working. I’ve got the static turned up, but her simpering ‘Say thank you’ comes through my defenses and makes me want to hurl. I kick the little goob that’s sniffing at my backpack.

Instead of bouncing across the room, it smears.

I freeze in horror, remembering suddenly, many summers ago, catching fireflies with my brother and putting them in a jar to keep by our bunk beds and fill the room with fairy lights, and while we were racing around the yard trying to capture them, I squished one by accident. There was the little blackberry stain of insect blood on my finger, but also this phosphorescent chalk that glowed green, the remains of the chemicals in the firefly’s abdomen that had lit up the night.

That’s what’s inside the dead goob: no blood or bone, just this chalky phosphorescent light-green mash that has smeared into the carpet. I look up, but get no reaction. Bob’s nodding his head, cow-like, behind my mother. They either don’t see the dead goob or won’t see it.

I maybe just killed the Littlest Goob.

I have to be out of there.

Immediately.

I bend to put the lemonade down, grabbing my backpack at the same time, but the glass tips off the table and spills, splashing juice on the smudged remains of the dead goob.

“Baby?”

The last look I get of my mom before I bolt, she has a vague, uneasy expression, like a sleepwalker who’s just come blearily awake in a bedroom not her own.

The hollandaise is turning blue
The pots and pans are all ahoo
There’s too much pepper in the stew
But the Littlest Goob, though small,
Is the wisest of them all
With kirsch and cream she shows the team how best to make fondue!

I head back to the now empty playground and settle in at a picnic table. My stomach is jumpy. No one is coming to rescue us: not my brother, not the Littlest Goob. I command my brain to fill with clever escape plans from this effed up life, but nothing comes. I could ride the rails like the runaways of yore. I could join the circus, or, just as unlikely, I could win a scholarship and go to college. Two years from now. Though that is by far the least appealing option, I heave out my history textbook and read about the French Revolution until the daylight’s all gone and the streetlamp above me is a whispering cone of whirling night bugs.

Then I head to Daniel’s, stopping on the way to spend my last three dollars on a pack of condoms. Guy at the store is icky. I don’t linger. In what seems like only seconds, I’m knocking on Daniel’s door.

“Hey.”

“Hey!?”

“Hey, could I spend the night?”

“Um, my parents aren’t here. They’ll be back later, but yeah, of course, I mean…”

This is not the most flattering reception, but, to be fair, I’m taking him by surprise. I’ve been to his place before, but never alone and never at night. Daniel lives in a real house with real bedrooms upstairs, real wood on the floors, and real AC. Two real parents too, and one with a real job. Imagine that.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be quiet and you can sneak me out the window in the morning.” Daniel’s smile is genuine now. He thinks I’m joking about the window, and he’s relieved that having a girl spend the night is suddenly something we can joke about. I’m relieved too, though I’m not joking: I’m perfectly ready to sneak out the window or hide under the bed. Daniel’s in pajamas already, and his dark hair is still wet from a shower. He guides me in, and we sit in the kitchen eating cheddar and apples and rehashing the most recent slash flux.

It’s an action sequence. The Four Horseman of Thermodynamics battle the gang for possession of Ilmr’s comatose body. Uncertainty Girl may be helping the bad guys, and she seems to have talked the flea into turning traitor as well.

Slash flux civil war. The online comments are all shock and outrage, but Daniel is sure Uncertainty Girl has a plan. I nod and agree, but really, we’re both just stalling. Neither of us seems to know when or how to start kissing.

The house is weirdly quiet.

Upstairs, I want to take a shower. I ask if he has a clean t-shirt I can sleep in, and he looks very briefly like this is the scariest thing that he has ever been asked. The shower is amazing: big fat droplets and the perfect temperature, though the only shampoo is baby shampoo, which is weird. So, truth-telling time: I’ve never had sex before, never bought a condom before, and my guess is that Daniel hasn’t either. We don’t know what we’re doing. But I like him, and here I am. In his shower. No way I’m going back to the trailer tonight.

Showered and toweled, I take a Japanese manga off the shelf and lie belly-down on his bed flipping through it. Daniel lies down too, looking over my shoulder, and then finally we are kissing. There’s something exhilarating about our clean cheeks and wet hair and the AC—having our faces pressed together feels better here than in the hot afternoons after school—but lying down like this, we don’t know what to do with our hands; my arm is tucked awkwardly under my head, and his free hand is on my shoulder with his elbow in the air like a violinist. It’s nice though, I don’t even care when my arm starts prickling.

We kiss for a long time, and then I say, maybe he should turn the light off, and he gets up and flips the switch. When he comes back to bed, we lie on our backs for a minute as our eyes adjust, and not knowing whether or when or how, I reach across and place my hand on his stomach with one finger just tucked under the elastic of his pajama bottoms. Daniel flinches and then doesn’t move. Neither of us move. We hardly even breathe. I don’t know what I’m waiting for him to do—push me away, pull me close—but it doesn’t happen. My hand on his stomach has turned us both to ice.

We’re motionless for an agonizing span of time. Minutes, not hours, but long awful minutes, measured breath by careful breath. Eventually, Daniel rolls away from me and feigns sleep. I do the same.

I have done something wrong. By not showing him the condoms, or by coming to his house at all. By wanting it too much, or not enough, I don’t know. Lying there pretending to sleep, I am in an agony of not knowing, but I’m certain our relationship will not survive the terrible, terrible awkwardness of tonight. For hours, I am paralyzed, my brain running a loop. I keep imagining myself trapped at home without a boyfriend, forced, for some reason, to sleep under the trailer like an unwanted dog while the goobs, lacking the Littlest, waltz in circles around the empty shell of my mother in the room above.

I wish I could will Ilmr’s snowstorm to come and erase me, but I can’t. I guess that’s her nightmare. Mine is turning out different.

I don’t know whether I ever truly sleep or not, but I’m awake and watching for dawn when it finally comes. I slip out of bed, slip into my shorts. I’m hoping to slip out of the house too before anyone wakes up—including Daniel—but it doesn’t work.

“You’re going? It’s early.”

Daniel rolls over and catches me changing shirts. I say the first thing that pops into my head.

“I’m … worried about my mom. I’m going to go check on her.”

Daniel says, “Can I come?” and I’m so surprised, that I don’t immediately produce an excuse. None of my friends ever comes to the trailer, for obvious reasons.

“I’ll just be a sec,” Daniel calls from the bathroom.

Outside, the streets are peaceful and empty. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Saturday morning dawn, but it’s nice, the air pleasant, not yet superheated by the sun. The sky is silvery, not all showy and pink, with these long thin clouds stretching across the horizon. Everything is slightly colorless and the sound of our footsteps is padded somehow, hushed. Daniel reaches out and we hold hands for a couple of blocks. It’s as if he believes we did something meaningful together last night, something more than lying side-by-side and staring at opposite walls in terror.

We don’t say much. But turning with Daniel into the trailer park, I picture him seeing the dead goob and the spilled lemonade and the mess in our trailer.

“Hey, could you hang here outside for just a minute? My mom, I’m not sure … let me check if she’s up.”

Daniel looks like he wants to reassure me, but I move away quickly. I leave him spinning the ancient tire-swing beside the trailer.

As soon as I open the screen door, I can see it’s all gone wrong. […]

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