The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of THE FALL WILL PROBABLY KILL YOU! (A LOVE STORY). Enjoy!

Commutative Properties

© Copyright 2023 by Brian McMahon

I have loved Charlotte Pennington, in some form or another, since the day I met her.

I was a little idiot—or maybe appropriately idiotic for my age—for the first several years of our friendship. I was too dumb to be able to explain the quality that made her stand out—what I now know to be a blend of maturity, precociousness, and the ability to think beyond the immediate now, beyond the imminent concern, beyond the circle of Me that swallows the vast majority of us whole as pre- and post-adolescents.

Charlotte is better than I am; I’m sure she knows as much. But I don’t think that because she is arrogant or because she thinks little of me. She is better than I am because she is curious. She is passionate and kind and adventurous, and I have found that combination to be quite rare.

 “She was nice to me in first grade” perhaps sounds like a bad reason for loving someone, but I think I loved Charlotte even before the moment she asked me (the new, scrawny boy in a classroom of pressed sweaters and mini-moms) to play during indoor recess. You can tell a lot about who a person will become when they’re six years old.

My memories of our first days together are, I admit, hazy. Perhaps my brain has filled in some pieces with images it likes, though I’m certain my smiles were really there. One of my first clear memories of Charlotte still chills me, an effect I find Penningtons have on me more than any others. 

It’s second grade, and we’re sitting cross-legged on opposite sides of the circle while Ms. Giordano, Hancock Elementary stalwart, takes us through the logic of the vaunted multiplication tables. Charlotte asks a question. She wonders why we’re moving so slowly, but she does not say so directly. She says, “So six times eight is just the same as eight times six then, right?” 

But some of our classmates aren’t ready for that, which Ms. Giordano understands. She and Charlotte have a separate line of communication, and I can tell even as a little idiot that the world moves slowly for Charlotte. She shares a look with our globular teacher, who recognized the maturity of her best student months before this. Then Charlotte looks at me, right at me, and makes a face, one we always make at each other. She hides her lips and rolls her eyes back a bit, and I laugh loud enough to get shushed, loud enough for the kids on either side of me to get accused as co-disruptors, and we move on to seven times eight, which, like eight times seven, equals fifty-six. Charlotte plays with her hair and looks past me, out the window, her locks just one shade blonder than they were the last time I saw her.

I do want to be clear: it has never been about the blonde hair that brushes the tops of her shoulders, blonde enough to make you think she lives in a state of permanent summer. It has never been about her long, sometimes clumsy legs or the other physical gifts bestowed on her, which did not appear until I had already loved her for several years. Maybe I was vaguely aware back then, in the six times eight era, that she was beautiful, but I did not truly discover it until much later. For a long time, I simply knew she was kind and that I was less lonely because of her. 

I am the youngest of three siblings, but my sister (now a doctor in San Francisco) is ten years older than I am, and my brother (now a lawyer in Chicago) is seven years older. My parents refused to admit the unplanned nature of my entrance into the world, but I confronted the possibility of being the product of a failed vasectomy before I could fully comprehend what the procedure was. My parents were tired of young-child parenting by the time I showed up. I tied my own shoes from an unusually young age; I learned to occupy myself with the minutiae of my Presidential Trivia and World Geography placemats at the dinner table while they spoke of things they assumed I was too young to understand. And anyway, parents can only take a lonely child so far. Friends like Charlotte take you the rest of the way. 

That’s not to say my parents neglected me. We spent time together; we played in the yard. We went to church at St. Stephen’s every Sunday until we didn’t anymore—my mother’s Catholicism waned steadily, unbeknownst to me, over the years. I think it was the sexual abuse of children that soured her. 

My father moved us from Manhattan to Riverside, Connecticut the summer after I finished kindergarten because the preceding years had brought him a new level of success. He worked in wealth management, and he was ready to put some space between us and the city. He would never admit it, but I think he took pride in his invasion of the upscale town, his rise to a financial standing that allowed him to plant his family right alongside those that paid his fees and made the Riversides of the world attainable for him, the boy from a small town on the eastern shore of Maryland that no one’s ever heard of.

My mother was not a complainer, but even as a little boy I could tell she missed the city. She embraced some of the trappings of our upward move: tennis, meandering lunches, social clubs that kept her away from home when she needed them to. 

She was smarter than my father, and kinder. She recognized that he was so dead set on proving he belonged in a place like Riverside that he neglected many other things. So she kept her distance from him, from his immovable view of the world, the world that she saw shrinking before his eyes. 

. . .

I don’t think of anyone in the Pennington family as affectionate. They were all capable of love. They were familiar with the moves and rituals that signified its presence. But they were cold by nature. Only Charlotte seemed to defy the genetic code. She expected, at least for a time, more from her parents, more than the rituals. She didn’t need attention—she has never been that type—but I think she recognized from a young age the peculiarity of its absence. 

By the time I ended up on her tee-ball team in the spring of first grade, Charlotte and I were buddies. At that point, her father was a young congressman with a large fortune, in addition to being our coach. When April rain delayed the opening of the town fields, he ran our practices in his backyard. The grass was immaculate, and the outfield quickly gave way to the trees that overlooked the pond, across which we could see other, inferior houses.

While I’m sure his coaching was primarily an excuse for photo ops, the Congressman was a competitive man, had been at least since his days as a backup quarterback at Princeton. He was never intimidating to us, but he was easily fired up, considering the physical limitations at play. 

Midway through our second practice, Charlotte and I swung our bats and waited for a scrimmage inning to start. 

“Keep it moving, gang!” the Congressman called out from his spot between the other fathers.

Gloves were picked up from the cool grass; games of tag were paused. Charlotte strode to the plate, waited for her father to place the ball on the tee, and then swung without gusto. When she reached first base as the third basewoman recoiled at the sight of the ball, Charlotte knew to stop, but she kept going even as the Congressman yelled, “Char, get back to the base! You know that’s wrong.” She raised her arms in celebration as she stomped onto second base. I walked to the plate. 

Who knows if Conrad Pennington and I would have become friends without my tee-ball prowess? I know only that he was enamored of me the moment I sent the kid-safe ball into the trees, over the heads of my peers, and rounded the bases. I almost caught Charlotte as she danced from third to home, and I watched her frown as her father scooped me up after I touched the plate. “What a bomb!” he exclaimed. “I think we’ve got our cleanup hitter.” 

“Daddy, I scored,” she squeaked. 

“You sure did, sweetie. Wasn’t that a great hit? Teddy’s a strong dude.” 

She dropped her helmet and rejoined a friend lounging on the grass beside our makeshift dugout. 

I think the Penningtons would have started inviting my family to their annual Christmas party even in the absence of my backyard heroics, but the hit must have helped. I remember my father’s joy at the sight of our first invitation—a family crest embossed across the top of the cardstock. He fawned over the Congressman with a mix of admiration and relief. My mother was happier to attend parties like the Penningtons’ than she let on. It was hard not to get swept up in the gaudy comfort of it all; the plushness of the spaces made you forget you were falling your way into them. 

A brief excerpt from the Penningtons’ party in December of my fifth-grade year

MY MOTHER. “Elizabeth, it is so good to see you. I love the Range Rover by the way. Very sleek.”

MRS. PENNINGTON. “Oh, thank you. Which one?” [And they laugh, and my mother can’t quite believe she’s laughing, and they squeeze each other’s hands, and they move on.] 

My friendship with Charlotte flourished throughout elementary school. It endured middle school. Charlotte was not as petty or as sensitive as the rest of us. She made time for me. Me, Teddy, who could never get a hold of How to Make It in Affluent Connecticut Teenagerdom. Unless I was on a baseball field or a basketball court, I was hopeless. I was uncool, not smooth, and friendless, though my athletic gifts were enough to keep me on the periphery of the “right” crowds. 

“I’m not cool,” I said flatly to Charlotte one afternoon after she had wondered why one of her friends failed to include me in a party that weekend. 

“Yeah, but you could be if you needed to be,” she said. “I think that’s all that matters.” 

“Maybe.” And we went back to shooting baskets; she participated only because she knew I liked it. 

Charlotte could have spent her free time with anyone, and sometimes she did leave me to fend for myself. But we walked home from school together when our schedules allowed, and we stayed in on Saturday nights once our classmates began indulging in activities we had deemed fit for a high-school-or-older crowd. I think Charlotte assumed I was taking a stand with her. In reality, I was always either scared or not invited. Just a three-minute walk separated our houses, though mine looked like a runty offspring of hers, the colors not quite right, the lawn browned where it didn’t need to be. 

We usually convened at the Pennington property; even when her family was home, there was plenty of room to hide. Once the divorce proceedings got going in seventh grade, we saw less of both parents. Her father started to fit more Washington into his schedule. I served as a sounding board, a shoulder to cry on, an audience for her vision of a different life, one that included California, its beaches, and all sorts of sprawl. 

We had reached our final weeks of middle school when I really started to believe she loved me. I still think she did. But on a Friday night, as we dangled our legs over their dock and I waited for the right moment to lean in, she informed me that she was going away. 

“For school,” she said. “My parents want me to focus on my grades. They want me to think about life beyond high school.”

Those were someone else’s words spilling out of her mouth, but it made sense for her to go, to set herself up for the stages of life that awaited us. To put distance between her and that house, looming behind. 

“Which school?” I asked. 

“Phillips Andover,” she said. “It’s in Massachusetts. It’ll be weird, but it’s a really good school. The campus is amazing, like a college or something.” 

And on she went, convincing us together. She said her parents had always planned to force her into private school for ninth grade. 

“I think it sounds fun,” I said once she reached a stopping point. “Better than getting bored here.”

She examined me for a second before looking back out at the water. “You won’t be bored,” she lied. “You’ve got friends. And girls like you.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Of course they do.”

I don’t even know now if she was referring to herself, so I sure as hell didn’t know back then. I let my hand move ever so slightly closer to hers on the damp wood. 

“Alanna likes you.”

“She told you that?”

“No, but I can tell.”

I shook my head, still hoping she would list other names. 

“Girls like guys like you, Teddy. You’re funny, you’re nice, you’re good at sports. That’s, like, the whole package.”

“We’ll see.”

“You’ll have a girlfriend before I come home for Thanksgiving.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t think I’ll have a girlfriend.” I tried not to picture her kissing another girl. The night was already challenging enough. 

“The guys will be cooler there. More interesting and, like, smarter.”

“Maybe,” she said. Then, after a pause during which I really hoped she was done, “I hope so.”

I stopped thinking about kissing her, though I wonder to this day what would have happened if I had tried, if she had let me, what we could have avoided by doing it, even poorly, for a moment. 

We stayed on the dock for another hour. She detailed for me the type of person who ended up at Andover, and the type who sought it out. She described the campus, the school’s history, and how seriously they took themselves there; she hid her lips and rolled her pure blue eyes back while she uttered the phrase Eight Schools Association. She told me I would visit. “It’ll give you an excuse to escape Riverside when you need to.” 

I asked her if she would spend summers at home, forgetting for a moment how much she treasured the quiet months at the beach. The frustrations of divorce would not keep her from Nantucket, from her pile of books and the oversized patio with stairs that fed right into the sand.

Eventually I walked home. I stretched the three minutes to five and waited for her to run after me. 

I did visit her once, a few weeks into our freshman year of high school. Andover’s campus was beautiful, and even Charlotte’s nonchalance failed to mask the excitement the place had brought to her life in a matter of days. New people, most of them facing the same frustrations that filled the world Charlotte wanted so desperately to leave behind. If she wasn’t going to escape those vicissitudes, I’m sure it was comforting to scrutinize them with the people I met. They all dressed well and seemed disinterested in being fifteen, dismissive of their own limitations. 

In Charlotte’s friend’s dorm room, we sat in a circle of several and drank beers. I sipped cautiously and took note of everyone else’s comfort. 

“So, Tommy,” one of the boys started.

“It’s Teddy,” Charlotte said for me. 

“Teddy, sorry,” he said. “You’ve known Charlotte your whole life?” 

“Not quite,” I answered. “Long time, though.”

Charlotte’s roommate perked up, swaying a Bud Light sway. “You two probably, like, took baths together and shit. Little babies.”

My careful sipping paid off in that I had nothing to spit out at the image of Charlotte sharing a bathtub with me. 

“Don’t think so,” Charlotte said, smiling my way but still straining to keep her place there. “Would have been a little weird by the time we met.” The conversation moved on. I leaned back against a corner of someone’s bed. 

An hour or so later, Charlotte told a story about hurting her leg jet skiing that I had never heard. I wondered if she was embellishing things, or if it had happened at all. What was she willing to keep from me?

. . .

My four years at Greenwich High were pleasant enough. I came into my own, or so I’ve been told. I worked harder in class, and I worked harder to make friends with the other boys, who all looked like each other. I guess I looked like them, too. We were horny and unreliable, and we were jealous of the worldlier boys and girls like Charlotte; we imagined them finding avenues through adolescence more glamorous than our own.

I saw more of the Congressman than I did Charlotte in those days. At the store, in his campaign commercials, often at the school track. He liked being shirtless there. Every time he saw me, he would lie: “Charlotte’s always asking about you.” She never asked him about anything, though I think she despised her mother more, for leaving.

“Another writing award I hear,” he said one afternoon late in my sophomore year after shaking my hand, leaving his cardio residue on my wrist. 

“That’s right, sir. Speech and Debate teacher had everyone in our class enter it.”

“Tell me again what you wrote about.”

“Jimmy Carter, sir.”

“A great man.”

“That’s right.”

“If only we had all known back then.”

“Known what, sir?”

“How rare it is to get a great man into that office.” The Congressman nodded to himself, smiled, and massaged a bare pectoral. 

Riverside is relatively small, meaning shirtless track appearances require a level of confidence few possess, and fewer deserve. The Congressman, stretching with a hand on the metal fence while sweat dripped toward his right-sized nipples, was bewitching. I was wowed by his discipline and stamina, infected by his charm. Sure, he made the side of the track feel like a campaign stop at times. But not a stale one. His background, his pedigree, led a lot of people to expect complacency. Why rage against a system that works more seamlessly for you than for anyone else? But he was the real deal, or at least came as close as we can expect anyone to come in a world like the one we have. Everyone except Charlotte’s mother agreed, and by then we had started to question her judgment as she unraveled, so to speak. Divorce had led to more drinking, more anger, and she didn’t hide it well from Charlotte, even from a distance. 

He found Andrea, an elegant and professional woman, at a law firm in the city and worked quickly enough to have his second wife slot filled by the time he ran for Senate. When he won, the local news covered his victory speech in its entirety. Charlotte and her little half-brother stood behind him on the platform. I couldn’t tell if she was proud of him or if her Andover acting classes were paying off. I texted her as much but did not receive a response, and I chalked it up to her getting bombarded with messages from all of us seventeen-year-olds watching WFSB at 11:15 on a Tuesday in November. 

. . .

As for senior year, Charlotte and I had not spoken since the Pennington Christmas party when we crossed paths days after our respective graduations.

Maybe school being over helped us. All I know is she was happy to see me in the parking lot of Abe’s Diner. Abe’s wasn’t much to look at. A fading sign and a narrow entranceway, but it contained so much more than the exterior suggested. I have always admired that about a place.

I was on my way out, alone, and she was headed in with three friends, whom she told to order for her. I recognized one of the girls. She didn’t say hello, but it comforted me to see a public-schooler in Charlotte’s midst. Before Charlotte said a word, I could tell she was exactly as I remembered her. Better yet, she was exactly as I had forecasted her: more beautiful, more sure of herself, eyes bluer—maybe just a trick of the sunlight. The gap between us, between woman and boy, greater than it had been on the dock where our feet dangled without touching the surface of the pond.

She had always been patient with me, more confident in who I could become than I was. I was plenty confident in her. She was fully formed. In the parking lot, I found myself fixated on our height, thrilled that I had her by an inch or two, as if that kept me in the running for something. 

“I’m so glad I ran into you, Teddy,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

“I missed you too,” I managed. 

“How was your senior year?” she asked. “You playing a sport next year? How are your parents?”

I hesitated. “Sorry,” she said, “too many questions.”

“It’s okay. Senior year was alright. I’m not doing a sport. Was thinking about baseball depending on the school, but I’ll just do club stuff I guess.”

She smiled and nodded. “That’s nice,” she said, devoid of the nerves tickling me. She pointed over her shoulder with a thumb. “I’ve gotta catch up with them, but I’m so glad I saw you.”

“Me too,” I squealed in an octave I thought I had lost the ability to produce. 

She gave me a “text me soon” and headed toward the entrance, but before she got there she asked, “Wait, Teddy, where are you going to school? I don’t think my parents told me. Or did you come up with a better plan than college? I wouldn’t put it past you.” 

“Georgetown,” I said. 

“No.”

“Uh, yes.”

She sprinted back to me and almost took me out. I smelled her shampoo and became aware of my own lackluster hair products for the first time. 

“I can’t believe we didn’t figure this out sooner. I’m going to Georgetown.”

Fate, right? I believe in fate. Greater forces at play, surely. 

“Amazing,” I mumbled as my heart began to thump. 

“Yeah, to be honest I was planning on UCLA,” she said, eyes upward, “but, I don’t know, I’ll get out west after school.”

“You better.”

A smile. Electricity. 

“Text me when you get home,” she said. “We’ve gotta catch up and talk about DC.” 

Full disclosure: I had a girlfriend at this time. We had been dating for a year, but we were 85% of the way to breaking up before I set foot in Abe’s Diner, and in or around that moment I decided for certain that Jody Braunstein and I were better off apart, a fact that Jody herself seemed sure of, a fact that I had tried to stave off three nights before on a splintery wooden bench overlooking the Greenwich High playing fields while she laid out a perfectly reasonable dissolution. Jody was on her way to Yale. I honestly cannot tell you why we started dating, or how. I’m not sure why I cried when she told me it was over, either, or why I fought so hard to undo her words. It’s difficult for me to remember anything from before that afternoon in the Abe’s parking lot, at least anything without Charlotte in it. I remember that I did not love Jody Braunstein. Not in the right way. 

I have only ever loved one person in the right way. And this is a love story, in some form or another.