Page 37 of The Art of Catching Feelings

D: “Chris Kepler finds pimples endearing.” I’m adding that to your Wikipedia.

C: Right next to “eschews batting gloves.” I sound like a real weirdo.

D: You sound nice.

Hedidsound nice. And that was the part that was going to get her in trouble, because the pull of these conversations was just too strong, even when she knew that there was no way he’d be saying any of this to her if he knew who she was. Maybe especially if he knew who she was.

C: Well, I said something not very nice tonight. I think I was trying to be funny. Or I wasn’t really thinking at all. And then afterward, I felt terrible.

Now that he was actually talking about it, she found that she didn’t want him to. He’d already apologized to her in person—it felt wrong to collect his private guilt, too.

D: That’s what got me in trouble recently. I thought I was being funny and instead I was just being mean. Maybe we’re not funny people?

C: I think you’re funny.

If only he knew.

D: And I bet if your joke hurt someone’s feelings, they knew you didn’t mean it. I’m sure you made it right.

C: We’ll see.

Daphne worried at her lower lip, scrolling back up through their conversation before opening up the text box again. She snapped a picture of Milo, who was resting next to her leg, not purring but just providing a solid mass of warmth.

D: Milo thinks it’ll be okay.

C: Well, then obviously it will be. Nice dinosaur pajamas, by the way.

They were her oldest, shabbiest pajama pants, lime green with hot pink T. rexes. She’d had them since college.

D: Send me a picture.

She was surprised when it came in. It was of a lanky guy, maybe in his early twenties or so, his hair long under a yellow baseball cap, his arm around a guy holding two thumbs up. It took a minute for her to realize that the guy in the yellow cap was a younger version of Chris, and the guy next to him must be his brother.

D: What’s that from?

C: The first game Tim came to see me play in the minors after I’d been drafted. I made one of the stupidest base-running errors of my life—basically, I didn’t actually touch second base when I was rounding it for a triple. Little League stuff. So the guy at third tagged me like no big deal, easy out. I was so embarrassed that my brother had seen that, but afterward we went to a diner for late-night pancakes and he just kept laughing, “How’d you miss the fucking bag, buddy?” Not in a harsh way, not how our dad would’ve said it. Just, “how’d you miss the fucking bag?”

C: For years afterward, he’d randomly say it. Over the most trivial stuff. If I spilled a bit of my drink at dinner. If I got a question wrong on Jeopardy if we were watching it with my dad. That kind of thing. It never failed to make me laugh.

C: I miss that.

He missedTim. Daphne knew that’s what he was saying, and she was suddenly profoundly grateful that he would tell her that story, that he would share that part of himself with her.

D: I love having those kinds of little inside jokes. And I love being brought into other peoples’.

C: Tim was always the funny one.

Daphne sat staring down at that message for a few minutes, just thinking about how hard it was to let go of someone—how impossible, really. How you might forever define yourself in relation to them, even after they were gone, how you might be afraid of losing those parts of your identity the way you’d lost them.

C: How would you feel about a phone call?

Now Daphne stared down at her screen for a very different reason, frozen by his question. She couldn’t talk to him using her own human voice! That would be a disaster. At the same time, she couldn’t deny the sharp pang of yearning she felt at the very idea, the way it shot right to her toes.

D: It’s pretty late. I should get to bed.

C: Oh yeah. I didn’t necessarily mean now.

C: (Although now would’ve been all right by me.)

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