Categories > TV > Teletubbies > The Desperate Type
Connor Murphy was staring miserably down into a cup of coffee and wearing a red scarf. Evan was pretty sure he could turn back, turn around, leave the coffee shop (and the state) and Connor Murphy would never even know Evan was the one who blew him off.
“Uh,” Evan said instead, unintelligently. “Uh. I uhm… I think I’m meeting you here.”
Connor looked up for barely a second. “Doubt it.”
“No, but, really–”
“Didn’t we have Spanish together?” Connor asked, looking up again, his eyes narrowing.
“Yeah, uh, last year, yeah.”
"Everyone in that class spent the week Señora Hendrick was out looking up ways to call me a freak in Spanish."
"Oh," Evan said, face flushing, because he remembered that. "I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't. I swear I didn't."
Connor sighed. “What's your name again? Emmet?”
“Evan. Hansen. Evan Hansen.”
“Connor Murphy.”
“I know… I mean. Uh. I meant. Shit, I uh… I meant that I knowyournamebecause of-of c-class, not anything weird like about your reputation or anything.”
Connor didn’t really react to that.
“I’m… I’m um… I’m OutOfUrTree.”
Connor Murphy blinked, looking perhaps a little surprised. “Oh.”
“You… You’re. The scarf?”
Connor nodded, jaw set tightly. “Right.”
“Sorry if I’m… not what you expected,” Evan muttered, gripping the strap of his backpack like it had morphed into a jet pack that would launch him into the sun any second.
“Do you want a coffee or something?”
“What?”
“Do. You. Want. Coffee?” Connor said slowly, nodding his head toward the bar.
“No, I mean, no thank you, I just… I don’t. Have....” Evan twisted the hem of his polo shirt tightly in his hands, wringing it, because he didn’t know how to explain that he didn’t really have the money for a five dollar coffee drink.
“I’ll buy.”
“Oh. N-no, it’s alright.”
Connor didn’t seem embarrassed to be seen with Evan stuttering all over himself, which was maybe nice, Evan didn’t know. “Dude. It’s fine. Let me buy you something. I owe you… since I shoved you the other day.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I can be kind of an asshole.” Connor shrugged, but didn’t apologize. “What do you want?”
Evan squeaked out an order, specifying that dairy milk was fine because he didn’t like soy milk and almond trees used for almond milk production were actually having a somewhat negative impact in the bee populations that were required to grow them.
Again, Connor didn’t seem embarrassed. Maybe he was more depressed than even Evan was. He headed off to the bar, and Evan sank miserably into the other seat at the table, wondering if now his brilliant partner plan was going to backfire after all and he would just keep on living like thing until he was in his middle fifties and his anxiety actually gave him a heart attack.
“I got it to go. I hope that’s fine.”
Evan usually didn’t order coffee at all, but especially not to go, because cardboard was wasteful, but then again this place claimed its cups were all made of recycled materials so he figured it would be fine just this once. “Thanks.”
“Can we get out of here? I don’t really want to do this in here, in front of everyone.”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure.”
Connor dropped his undrunk coffee into the bin near the garbage and led the way out of the coffee shop. He headed toward the mostly abandoned yard outside of the school, lighting a cigarette and then Evan stupidly opened his stupid mouth, saying, “You smoke?” but it was more like “You smoke?! ” and Connor gave him a look, shrugging.
“Oh. That’s cool or whatever. I didn’t know.”
“Right,” Connor said, and they grabbed a picnic table in a sort of secluded area of the quad which was in the shade of a big maple tree. “So.”
“So….”
Connor took a long drag on the cigarette. “So, we’re probably going to need to take some time to plan this out, unfortunately. I tried to off myself the first week of school but my parents found me out before I got the job done and now they’re watching me like a hawk and literally won’t let me go anywhere without them.”
“Right.”
“We’re going to need to make it look like we’re friends so that they’ll let me go somewhere with you.”
“Okay.” Evan didn’t know how to do that.
“Uh. I guess we should probably talk details.”
“Sure.”
“You’re serious about this, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Because if you’re just going to flake out then I’d rather do it myself.”
“No, I’m serious.”
Connor looked at him, eyes sort of narrowed, and Evan felt very much like he was being X-rayed. “This had better not be a joke.”
“It’s… it’s not!”
“If this is Jared Kleinman trying to fuck with me again, I will freak out and kill him.”
“No, J-Jared? No! He. I didn’t say anything about this to Jared. I swear Ididn’tevenknowyouwereyou.”
Connor stared at him for another minute, then nodded, like Evan had won over his approval. “Do you have any specific plans in mind?”
Evan could literally hear his blood rushing through his body and he stuttered out, his brain almost short circuiting, because suddenly his brain was full of the stories of those kids from Columbine High School and how the one was just suicidal but became friends with a sociopath and then they tried to bomb the school, which most people don’t know is that they meant to bomb the school, but they still shot and killed like a dozen people, and Evan didn’t want to hurt other people but he was suicidal and what if you just could kill people if you wanted to die anyway and then his mother would have to live with being the mother of a school shooter and his dad would be on CNN even though he hated CNN, “You’re not like planning to shoot up the school right?” but it came out more like “you’renotplanningtoshootuptheschoolrightareyou?” and Connor…
Laughed.
“Wh-what did I say?”
“I get it. School shooter chic , yeah?”
Evan started to sputter something, but Connor kept laughing. Hollow laugh. It wasn’t like it was really funny.
“No I get it. I deserved that one. It’s fine,” Connor said.
Evan tried to take a deep breath. And then tried to take a swallow of his coffee, only to choke on it and then cough a few times before his airway was clear again. “So. You’re not…?”
“No. I don’t even know where I could get a gun right now, considering that my dad has locked up all of the pencils for being too sharp.”
Evan stilled for a brief second. “Really?”
Connor gave him a look. “Yeah. I wouldn’t lie. My parents are a fucking disaster.”
“Sorry.”
“So are you open to methods or something? I’m not really interested in making this a murder-suicide thing.”
“No, no,” Evan said, yelped, whatever. “No. I’m just… Thinking. I don’t know. I guess the how isn’t important to me. Just. That it happens.”
“Same. We’ll have to figure something out soon then.”
“Okay.”
“So…” Connor said, dropping his cigarette on the ground and stubbing it out. “What happened to your arm?”
“Oh I uh… fell out of a tree, actually.”
Connor raised an eyebrow. “Fell?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that like… on purpose?”
Evan mumbled something that even he didn’t quite understand.
“No one’s signed your cast.”
“No… I know.”
“Well I’ll sign it.”
Evan looked at the white cast, still blank. “You don’t have to.”
Connor looked a little irritated. “Come on. We can pretend like we’re friends.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess.”
“Do you have a sharpie?”
Evan pulled one from his khakis, and Connor uncapped it before writing CONNOR in massive capital letters across nearly his entire cast. “Oh. Great. Thanks…”
Connor was standing up now, looking at his phone, muttering, “Damn, it’s 4:30. My sister’s going to be leaving band practice and she’ll go ballistic if she can’t find me after.”
“Why?”
Connor rolled his eyes. “She’s pretty much babysitting me while we’re at school. We have to share a car.”
“Oh. That… that sucks.”
Connor blinked a few times. “Actually, this is perfect. Come with me? We’ll tell her I bought you coffee to make nice and she’ll tell my parents.”
“Great,” Evan said lamely. He didn’t know why but the whole thing was making him feel a bit deflated. Something about tricking people felt awful. He followed Connor back inside the school, toward the band room, and it only really connected for him that he was about to encounter Zoe Murphy a moment before he actually encountered her.
“Connor, what the hell?” She practically shouted, which made Evan flinched. “I was about to call mom to say you took off. You said you were going to do homework in the band room.” She got closer then wrinkled her nose. “Where did you get cigarettes? Since when do you smoke cigarettes? I’m going to have to tell mom and dad.”
“It’s kind of loud in the band room,” Connor drawled, like he was bored. “So I went to get coffee.”
“Coffee?” Zoe repeated, like he had said something more sinister like “I went to go murder small animals and then snort a bunch of drugs.”
“Yeah. Coffee,” Connor said, and then he pointed to Evan’s coffee cup and then Zoe Murphy looked at him for the first time and it was like he was going to throw up an internal organ like his spleen or something because she smiled at Evan briefly before returning her gaze to Connor. “I got coffee with Evan.”
Zoe narrowed her eyes. “Did he do something awful to make you get coffee with him?” She asked Evan, and he had this hilarious image in his head of being forced into a Starbucks at gunpoint and then he tittered a little which made both Connor and Zoe look at him like he was actually an insane person, which he was, so then Evan cleared his throat a few times to try to explain.
“No, no, s-sorry,” Evan said, “Sorry. It’s just a. He. Er. Connor he took me to get coffee to uh, s-say sorry for shoving me the other day. Sorry. It’s just… We just got coffee.”
“Oh,” Zoe said, smiling again. At Evan. Evan caught Connor giving him a thumbs up behind her back, but not like a “yeah nice job” thumbs up but more like a “smooth move there, asshole,” thumbs up. Whatever. “That was… nice.” She eyed Connor suspiciously. “Why are you being nice to Evan, Connor?”
Connor rolled his eyes. “Fuck you Zoe.”
“I…” She looked sympathetically back at Evan, then said, “Connor, you aren’t nice to anyone. It’s kind of your signature thing. What’s going on?”
Connor just crossed his arms over his chest.
Zoe looked imploringly at Evan. “Is something going on?”
Evan shook his head, too hard too much it definitely looked super weird, so he said, “No, he just said he wanted to apologize for the other day and that, uh, hey, we could get coffee?”
Zoe still didn’t look satisfied, but she didn’t push. “We should get home, Connor.”
“Yeah, sure,” He said, sounding disinterested. “Evan. We should hang out soon.”
“Definitely, yeah, that would be… cool.”
“Maybe you can come over or something.”
“Sounds good, yeah.”
Zoe still looked lost, but then she said goodbye to Evan and followed Connor out to the student parking lot.
That night, Evan opened facebook to see that he had a friend request from Connor Murphy. He accepted it without hesitation. It was probably a good way to pretend to be friends.
Evan looked at his facebook feed. Even though he hardly spoke to anyone at school, he had nearly fifty facebook friends.
He wondered how many facebook friends Connor Murphy had.
A moment later, he got a facebook message.
From Connor.
“Do you think you could come over after school tomorrow?”
“I’ll ask my mom.”
“Thanks.”
Evan closed his laptop, walking into the living room where he found his mother eating leftover Chinese food with a large book on her lap.
“Hey Mom.”
“Hi honey. I didn’t know you were still awake.”
“Just h-heading up now. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to go over to my friend Connor’s house tomorrow after school.”
“Oh?” His mom put her chopsticks into the carton, smiling at him. “Connor?”
“Yeah, uh, Connor Murphy… he um… he’s in my grade.”
His mom smiled. “He signed your cast!”
“Yeah. Anyway, he asked if I wanted to hang out after school tomorrow so if that’s okay I will just go upstairs and text him to let him know that I am going to come over.”
“Sure thing honey. Get a good night’s sleep.”
Evan didn’t like how easily he had lied to his mother.
Was he a liar now?
Wasn’t he always lying? Didn’t it count as lying when he told his mom he was really trying to write those letters to himself but all they ever turned out to be were laundry lists of the ways he hated himself.
And then there was lying to Dr. Sherman. He was always pretending to be better for Dr. Sherman, only to go home be too anxious to even order a pizza online.
And then there was the big one. Was simply existing, business as usual a lie? Was he lying about wanting to be alive by not telling anyone he wanted to just… stop?
Regardless, he had practically broken out in hives during his lunch in the library, thinking about how much Connor’s parents were definitely going to hate him. Hate him when they realized he was lying. Hate him when they met him, because here he was, trying to lie about being normal and chill and not a mess at all, and if they hated him then they wouldn’t let Connor be around him which would literally ruin their plans and then Evan would just…
Keep lying.
Ad nauseum, into infinity.
“Uh,” Evan said instead, unintelligently. “Uh. I uhm… I think I’m meeting you here.”
Connor looked up for barely a second. “Doubt it.”
“No, but, really–”
“Didn’t we have Spanish together?” Connor asked, looking up again, his eyes narrowing.
“Yeah, uh, last year, yeah.”
"Everyone in that class spent the week Señora Hendrick was out looking up ways to call me a freak in Spanish."
"Oh," Evan said, face flushing, because he remembered that. "I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't. I swear I didn't."
Connor sighed. “What's your name again? Emmet?”
“Evan. Hansen. Evan Hansen.”
“Connor Murphy.”
“I know… I mean. Uh. I meant. Shit, I uh… I meant that I knowyournamebecause of-of c-class, not anything weird like about your reputation or anything.”
Connor didn’t really react to that.
“I’m… I’m um… I’m OutOfUrTree.”
Connor Murphy blinked, looking perhaps a little surprised. “Oh.”
“You… You’re. The scarf?”
Connor nodded, jaw set tightly. “Right.”
“Sorry if I’m… not what you expected,” Evan muttered, gripping the strap of his backpack like it had morphed into a jet pack that would launch him into the sun any second.
“Do you want a coffee or something?”
“What?”
“Do. You. Want. Coffee?” Connor said slowly, nodding his head toward the bar.
“No, I mean, no thank you, I just… I don’t. Have....” Evan twisted the hem of his polo shirt tightly in his hands, wringing it, because he didn’t know how to explain that he didn’t really have the money for a five dollar coffee drink.
“I’ll buy.”
“Oh. N-no, it’s alright.”
Connor didn’t seem embarrassed to be seen with Evan stuttering all over himself, which was maybe nice, Evan didn’t know. “Dude. It’s fine. Let me buy you something. I owe you… since I shoved you the other day.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I can be kind of an asshole.” Connor shrugged, but didn’t apologize. “What do you want?”
Evan squeaked out an order, specifying that dairy milk was fine because he didn’t like soy milk and almond trees used for almond milk production were actually having a somewhat negative impact in the bee populations that were required to grow them.
Again, Connor didn’t seem embarrassed. Maybe he was more depressed than even Evan was. He headed off to the bar, and Evan sank miserably into the other seat at the table, wondering if now his brilliant partner plan was going to backfire after all and he would just keep on living like thing until he was in his middle fifties and his anxiety actually gave him a heart attack.
“I got it to go. I hope that’s fine.”
Evan usually didn’t order coffee at all, but especially not to go, because cardboard was wasteful, but then again this place claimed its cups were all made of recycled materials so he figured it would be fine just this once. “Thanks.”
“Can we get out of here? I don’t really want to do this in here, in front of everyone.”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure.”
Connor dropped his undrunk coffee into the bin near the garbage and led the way out of the coffee shop. He headed toward the mostly abandoned yard outside of the school, lighting a cigarette and then Evan stupidly opened his stupid mouth, saying, “You smoke?” but it was more like “You smoke?! ” and Connor gave him a look, shrugging.
“Oh. That’s cool or whatever. I didn’t know.”
“Right,” Connor said, and they grabbed a picnic table in a sort of secluded area of the quad which was in the shade of a big maple tree. “So.”
“So….”
Connor took a long drag on the cigarette. “So, we’re probably going to need to take some time to plan this out, unfortunately. I tried to off myself the first week of school but my parents found me out before I got the job done and now they’re watching me like a hawk and literally won’t let me go anywhere without them.”
“Right.”
“We’re going to need to make it look like we’re friends so that they’ll let me go somewhere with you.”
“Okay.” Evan didn’t know how to do that.
“Uh. I guess we should probably talk details.”
“Sure.”
“You’re serious about this, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Because if you’re just going to flake out then I’d rather do it myself.”
“No, I’m serious.”
Connor looked at him, eyes sort of narrowed, and Evan felt very much like he was being X-rayed. “This had better not be a joke.”
“It’s… it’s not!”
“If this is Jared Kleinman trying to fuck with me again, I will freak out and kill him.”
“No, J-Jared? No! He. I didn’t say anything about this to Jared. I swear Ididn’tevenknowyouwereyou.”
Connor stared at him for another minute, then nodded, like Evan had won over his approval. “Do you have any specific plans in mind?”
Evan could literally hear his blood rushing through his body and he stuttered out, his brain almost short circuiting, because suddenly his brain was full of the stories of those kids from Columbine High School and how the one was just suicidal but became friends with a sociopath and then they tried to bomb the school, which most people don’t know is that they meant to bomb the school, but they still shot and killed like a dozen people, and Evan didn’t want to hurt other people but he was suicidal and what if you just could kill people if you wanted to die anyway and then his mother would have to live with being the mother of a school shooter and his dad would be on CNN even though he hated CNN, “You’re not like planning to shoot up the school right?” but it came out more like “you’renotplanningtoshootuptheschoolrightareyou?” and Connor…
Laughed.
“Wh-what did I say?”
“I get it. School shooter chic , yeah?”
Evan started to sputter something, but Connor kept laughing. Hollow laugh. It wasn’t like it was really funny.
“No I get it. I deserved that one. It’s fine,” Connor said.
Evan tried to take a deep breath. And then tried to take a swallow of his coffee, only to choke on it and then cough a few times before his airway was clear again. “So. You’re not…?”
“No. I don’t even know where I could get a gun right now, considering that my dad has locked up all of the pencils for being too sharp.”
Evan stilled for a brief second. “Really?”
Connor gave him a look. “Yeah. I wouldn’t lie. My parents are a fucking disaster.”
“Sorry.”
“So are you open to methods or something? I’m not really interested in making this a murder-suicide thing.”
“No, no,” Evan said, yelped, whatever. “No. I’m just… Thinking. I don’t know. I guess the how isn’t important to me. Just. That it happens.”
“Same. We’ll have to figure something out soon then.”
“Okay.”
“So…” Connor said, dropping his cigarette on the ground and stubbing it out. “What happened to your arm?”
“Oh I uh… fell out of a tree, actually.”
Connor raised an eyebrow. “Fell?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that like… on purpose?”
Evan mumbled something that even he didn’t quite understand.
“No one’s signed your cast.”
“No… I know.”
“Well I’ll sign it.”
Evan looked at the white cast, still blank. “You don’t have to.”
Connor looked a little irritated. “Come on. We can pretend like we’re friends.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess.”
“Do you have a sharpie?”
Evan pulled one from his khakis, and Connor uncapped it before writing CONNOR in massive capital letters across nearly his entire cast. “Oh. Great. Thanks…”
Connor was standing up now, looking at his phone, muttering, “Damn, it’s 4:30. My sister’s going to be leaving band practice and she’ll go ballistic if she can’t find me after.”
“Why?”
Connor rolled his eyes. “She’s pretty much babysitting me while we’re at school. We have to share a car.”
“Oh. That… that sucks.”
Connor blinked a few times. “Actually, this is perfect. Come with me? We’ll tell her I bought you coffee to make nice and she’ll tell my parents.”
“Great,” Evan said lamely. He didn’t know why but the whole thing was making him feel a bit deflated. Something about tricking people felt awful. He followed Connor back inside the school, toward the band room, and it only really connected for him that he was about to encounter Zoe Murphy a moment before he actually encountered her.
“Connor, what the hell?” She practically shouted, which made Evan flinched. “I was about to call mom to say you took off. You said you were going to do homework in the band room.” She got closer then wrinkled her nose. “Where did you get cigarettes? Since when do you smoke cigarettes? I’m going to have to tell mom and dad.”
“It’s kind of loud in the band room,” Connor drawled, like he was bored. “So I went to get coffee.”
“Coffee?” Zoe repeated, like he had said something more sinister like “I went to go murder small animals and then snort a bunch of drugs.”
“Yeah. Coffee,” Connor said, and then he pointed to Evan’s coffee cup and then Zoe Murphy looked at him for the first time and it was like he was going to throw up an internal organ like his spleen or something because she smiled at Evan briefly before returning her gaze to Connor. “I got coffee with Evan.”
Zoe narrowed her eyes. “Did he do something awful to make you get coffee with him?” She asked Evan, and he had this hilarious image in his head of being forced into a Starbucks at gunpoint and then he tittered a little which made both Connor and Zoe look at him like he was actually an insane person, which he was, so then Evan cleared his throat a few times to try to explain.
“No, no, s-sorry,” Evan said, “Sorry. It’s just a. He. Er. Connor he took me to get coffee to uh, s-say sorry for shoving me the other day. Sorry. It’s just… We just got coffee.”
“Oh,” Zoe said, smiling again. At Evan. Evan caught Connor giving him a thumbs up behind her back, but not like a “yeah nice job” thumbs up but more like a “smooth move there, asshole,” thumbs up. Whatever. “That was… nice.” She eyed Connor suspiciously. “Why are you being nice to Evan, Connor?”
Connor rolled his eyes. “Fuck you Zoe.”
“I…” She looked sympathetically back at Evan, then said, “Connor, you aren’t nice to anyone. It’s kind of your signature thing. What’s going on?”
Connor just crossed his arms over his chest.
Zoe looked imploringly at Evan. “Is something going on?”
Evan shook his head, too hard too much it definitely looked super weird, so he said, “No, he just said he wanted to apologize for the other day and that, uh, hey, we could get coffee?”
Zoe still didn’t look satisfied, but she didn’t push. “We should get home, Connor.”
“Yeah, sure,” He said, sounding disinterested. “Evan. We should hang out soon.”
“Definitely, yeah, that would be… cool.”
“Maybe you can come over or something.”
“Sounds good, yeah.”
Zoe still looked lost, but then she said goodbye to Evan and followed Connor out to the student parking lot.
That night, Evan opened facebook to see that he had a friend request from Connor Murphy. He accepted it without hesitation. It was probably a good way to pretend to be friends.
Evan looked at his facebook feed. Even though he hardly spoke to anyone at school, he had nearly fifty facebook friends.
He wondered how many facebook friends Connor Murphy had.
A moment later, he got a facebook message.
From Connor.
“Do you think you could come over after school tomorrow?”
“I’ll ask my mom.”
“Thanks.”
Evan closed his laptop, walking into the living room where he found his mother eating leftover Chinese food with a large book on her lap.
“Hey Mom.”
“Hi honey. I didn’t know you were still awake.”
“Just h-heading up now. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to go over to my friend Connor’s house tomorrow after school.”
“Oh?” His mom put her chopsticks into the carton, smiling at him. “Connor?”
“Yeah, uh, Connor Murphy… he um… he’s in my grade.”
His mom smiled. “He signed your cast!”
“Yeah. Anyway, he asked if I wanted to hang out after school tomorrow so if that’s okay I will just go upstairs and text him to let him know that I am going to come over.”
“Sure thing honey. Get a good night’s sleep.”
Evan didn’t like how easily he had lied to his mother.
Was he a liar now?
Wasn’t he always lying? Didn’t it count as lying when he told his mom he was really trying to write those letters to himself but all they ever turned out to be were laundry lists of the ways he hated himself.
And then there was lying to Dr. Sherman. He was always pretending to be better for Dr. Sherman, only to go home be too anxious to even order a pizza online.
And then there was the big one. Was simply existing, business as usual a lie? Was he lying about wanting to be alive by not telling anyone he wanted to just… stop?
Regardless, he had practically broken out in hives during his lunch in the library, thinking about how much Connor’s parents were definitely going to hate him. Hate him when they realized he was lying. Hate him when they met him, because here he was, trying to lie about being normal and chill and not a mess at all, and if they hated him then they wouldn’t let Connor be around him which would literally ruin their plans and then Evan would just…
Keep lying.
Ad nauseum, into infinity.
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