“Call me or text me if you end up needing help. I have a ladder I could bring.”
She snorted. “I think a ladder might be kind of noisy. The idea is to draw less attention to the fact that I’m sneaking out under my fun-Nazi father’s nose, not more.”
I shrugged. “Just a thought. I could make you a grappling hook?”
“A grappling hook?” Becca laughed outright at that. “Where are you going to get a grappling hook?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. Maybe I could just steal the anchor from my dad’s fishing boat? I could toss it into your window, and you could shimmy down it.”
Becca laughed even harder at that. “Because that’s not conspicuous at all.”
We both pushed away from the lockers and strolled down the hallway toward the front office and the exit. Somehow, my hand ended up tangled in Becca’s, our fingers twined together. We both looked down at our joined hands and then at each other.
“Yep,” I said. “You’re my girlfriend. Don’t even try to deny it.”
Becca slapped my bicep with her free hand but didn’t take her hand out of mine. “I agreed to no such thing. I might be, but then again, I might not be. Nothing’s official. The jury is still out.”
“You’re just trying to play it cool, Becca. Don’t lie.” I tugged her so she stumbled against my side, and then I wrapped my arm around her waist, careful to keep it in the kosher-zone above her waistline but beneath her bra strap.
She seemed to have stopped breathing, but she didn’t pull away. She might have burrowed a little closer, actually. “Have you met me? I’m the furthest thing from cool.” She murmured the words as if she believed them but didn’t want me to.
I frowned down at her. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I pulled her to a stop and twisted her to face me. Her body was flush against mine, soft and fitting perfectly. Her chin rested on my chest, and I knew she could feel my heart crashing against my ribcage.
“I think you’re cool, Becca,” I said. “I always have.”
She wrinkled her nose in confusion. “You have? I always kind of figured you barely knew who I was.”
I made a face at her. “That’s not possible. You’re too beautiful to fade into the background.”
She tilted her head to rest her cheek against my shirt, then shook her curls in denial. “I’m not, but thanks.”
“You’re not supposed to disagree with me. I can think whatever I want about you, and it’s true because I think it.”
She turned her face up to look at me, a comical expression of puzzlement on her features. “That is very dizzyingly circular logic. You think what you think, and it’s true because you think it?” Her arms slid up my back to grip my triceps.
“It’s kind of like ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Wasn’t it Marcel Proust who said that?”
Becca snickered, not quite derisively. “Descartes, actually. Proust is someone totally different.”
I laughed. “See, that’s what I get for trying to be smart.”
“I was just impressed that you knew that phrase, and that you knew who Proust was.”
I grunted. “Well, obviously, I don’t know either. I’ve got no clue who Proust was. And I’m not even sure I understand the phrase much better.”
We started walking again, and our hands resumed their twined grip around each other.
“Marcel Proust was a French novelist best known for his work In Search of Lost Time. He was one of the first writers to openly discuss homosexuality, which was a really big deal when he lived, around the turn of the century.” Becca seemed to lose herself in reciting the facts, her words coming out effortlessly, although she sounded like she was composing an essay. “The phrase cogito ergo sum, which translates from the Latin into ‘I think, therefore I am,’ was a philosophical statement proposed by the French philosopher René Descartes in the seventeenth century. And actually, the phrase was written in French, as Je pense, donc je suis. All it really means is that the process of doubting whether or not you exist is proof of your existence.”
“Why would anyone doubt their own existence? It seems pretty self-explanatory, you know? I’m here, I see things, I feel things. I am, therefore I am.”
Becca tilted her head and nodded slowly. “Very good. That’s a good point. And a lot of laypeople gave that exact same answer to the philosphers. To them, though—the philosophers, I mean—the idea went deeper than that. It went back to Plato, who talked about ‘the knowledge of knowledge.’ Think about it like this: Who told you two plus two equals four?”
I answered immediately. “My kindergarten teacher. But she showed me, with blocks. Two blocks plus two blocks means I have four blocks.”
“Right, that’s a concrete example. But apply that doubt, that ‘who told you so?’ mindset to more insubstantial, metaphysical ideas, like one’s place in life, in the universe. Like the conundrum, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear, does it make any noise?”
I snorted. “That one is stupid. Just ask the squirrel who jumps out of the falling tree if he heard the damn thing crash to the ground.”
Becca laughed. “You’re taking all the fun out of the argument. But you see my point, or rather, their point. That’s what Descartes was saying. The fact that he could outline physical reality as perceived by himself proved his own existence, in his perception of reality at least. ‘I must finally conclude that the proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.’ That was his ultimate argument.”
I chewed on my lip and thought about it. “I guess I see his point. Like, how do I know what you see, how do I know what you’re thinking? I don’t. I only know what I know. If there’s no one around to hear a sound, the sound exists, but it doesn’t necessarily exist in the sense that it has…I don’t know…it doesn’t have any purpose if no one’s around to receive the sound waves.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, sort of.”
“Meaning I’ve totally missed it, but you’re too nice to say so.” She ducked her head, and I knew I was right. “See? Trying to get into a philosophical discussion with you is an exercise in futility. My brain just don’t work that way.”
She pushed at me with her hip. “I’m just a freak that way. I had to write a paper on Descartes for a philosophy class I took at the college last semester.”