You Know Me Well

  It’s not his diary, though. It’s something he was planning to read to everyone. So I figure it’s okay to look.

  Only, after I’m done, it doesn’t feel okay.

  I’m ready to lose myself,

  but I’m not ready to lose you.

  I’m ready to find myself,

  But I’m not ready for you to know what I find.

  If you want me to change,

  be ready for me to change.

  I don’t think you’re ready for that.

  I don’t think I’m ready for that.

  Why do you have to risk the good things

  for the better things?

  I’m not ready for the answer.

  I know he’s gone—they’re gone—but I go out into the hall anyway. When I find he’s not there, I take out my phone again. But what can I say? That I’m ready for him to change? That I’m ready for him to do what he wants to do? The past few days have shown that’s not true.

  I guess I’m not ready, either.

  Quinn’s heading to the mic when I walk in. I put the second page of Ryan’s poem on the table. Katie’s eyes grow wider as she reads it. And they grow even wider when Quinn surprises us all by announcing, “Welcome back, bitches. The Queer Youth Poetry Slam is now spiked as punch to welcome Lehna to the mic!”

  THURSDAY

  18

  Kate

  It’s a normal Thursday morning in my kitchen. The coffeepot hisses and puffs as it always does; we sit at the round breakfast table as we always do. Mom, as always, reads the business section while Dad, as always, reads about the foreign news first and then cheers himself up with Arts and Entertainment.

  We eat toast and fruit and yogurt.

  We reach over one another for the box of half-and-half or the jar of honey.

  Periodically, we check the bright red clock until one of us says, “Seven thirty,” at which point we’ll collect and rinse the dishes, put the perishables back in the refrigerator, and walk to our three cars, parked side by side in our wide suburban driveway. I can’t even explain the comfort I take in this routine. The comfort could fill the sky—it’s that immense.

  But I haven’t been able to enjoy it for months, because of this thing I’ve been carrying. This anxiety. This crushing, terrible dread. This weight I decided to shed yesterday in the shadow room, holding hands with Mark and Violet. We were like a paper chain of children. We were substance and shadow. We were heat and clutched hands, and wonder, and love. And that clarity I got—it was breathtaking, it took me by surprise, and then it let me go.

  So maybe a normal Thursday morning at the breakfast table is not the right time to do this, but I’m doing it anyway.

  “Mom?” I say. “Dad? Can I talk to you guys for a second?”

  They lower their sections of the paper.

  “Of course,” Dad says.

  “You can have more than a second,” Mom adds, smiling even though I can see her nervousness.

  “I’ve been having a hard time lately.”

  “Something’s happened with Lehna, hasn’t it?” Dad says. “The house hasn’t been this quiet since you two met.”

  “Shh,” Mom says. “Let her tell us, sweetheart.”

  “Right. Go on, Katie.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Lehna and I are going through some stuff. That’s part of it, maybe, I don’t know. But what I’m really struggling with is college.”

  Mom cocks her head. Dad takes his glasses off—very, very slowly—and presses on the spot between his eyebrows.

  “I don’t want to go,” I say. “Not yet.”

  “Hmmmm,” Mom says.

  Dad keeps pressing between his brows. Harder and harder.

  “Can you … elaborate?” Mom asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. I just want to defer for a year. Every time I think about leaving I panic. I know it’s normal to be nervous, that it’s huge—to leave home, fend for myself—so it’s expected to feel kind of shaky about it. But I should be a little bit excited, too, right? And I’m not. I’m not at all. I can’t even think about it because I hate the idea so much.”

  “You hate the idea,” Mom says.

  “I do. I hate it. Dad, you’re stressing me out. You’re going to bruise your face.”

  “I don’t even,” Dad says. “I don’t even know…”

  “I think what your father is saying is that we need a little time to sit with this.”

  I have no idea what’s going on inside her head. Her voice is calm; she’s even smiling. But she works in the Human Resources department at an investment firm. She’s used to telling people what they’ve done wrong in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. She’s used to firing people and making it sound like an opportunity.

  “Fair,” I say. “It’s seven thirty anyway.”

  We all rise. Dad puts his glasses back on.

  “We love you, Katie,” Dad says.

  “Kate,” Mom corrects.

  “Right,” he says. “Kate. We’ll pick this up later on, okay? When we have more time.”

  I nod. We clear the dishes and we rinse them. We grab our bags and hoist them over our shoulders. We walk single file out the door and to our three cars.

  “Just a year,” I say, before we all slide in.

  My mother nods. My father sighs.

  And then they pull away, and I hear my phone ringing from the back. I haven’t left yet, so I jump out and get my bag, and I look at the caller.

  Ryan. His name on my screen takes me by surprise. We haven’t texted since last year when we were working on the lit mag cover. I had forgotten that I even had his number.

  “You answered,” he says. “Are you with him?”

  “Mark?” I say. “No. I’m on my way to pick him up.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Um … getting ready for school I’d imagine?”

  “Not right this second. That’s not what I meant. Or maybe I did. Right now he’s probably finishing his homework for first period. Or brushing his teeth? He brushes his teeth a lot. Like a lot a lot. Or maybe that’s just because he thought we might be making out and he was trying to be prepared. I never thought about that, but it’s probably what it was.”

  “Hey,” I say. “Are you okay?”

  “No. I don’t know. I’m tired. I didn’t sleep.”

  “At all?”

  “He saw the poem, right? I mean the rest of it, right? I know he did. I can just feel it. And his phone was off. Off at midnight, off at two, off at five, off at seven. It’s just been totally … off.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “He read the rest of it.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew it. We left. I was … upset. At least that’s what Taylor kept saying, ‘You’re upset. You’re upset,’ and he said we should probably leave, so we left. And then we got back to his place and I remembered that I dropped my poem. That it was just lying there on the stage somewhere, all alone, for anyone to find and make fun of, and I panicked. I left him and I ran all the way back, and everything was over and almost everyone was gone, but they let me back in anyway and I looked all over the stage, but it wasn’t there. But then I found it, and it was face up, right there on the table, and I knew it. I knew he’d read it. How did he react?”

  “You should probably ask him that yourself,” I say.

  “I told you already! His phone. Is fucking. Off.”

  “Then ask him at school.”

  “I don’t think I can go to school today. I’m not really feeling well.”

  I want to tell him he doesn’t need to state the obvious. I didn’t know Ryan was capable of this kind of emotion. I thought he was all literary allusion and little feeling, all critic and no poet. But then I think of him onstage last night, all tremor and fear, and I feel myself softening for him, even though he’s crushed my friend’s heart and might not deserve my sympathy.

  “Are you okay, Ryan?” I ask him. “That’s a sincere question and I
want a sincere answer.”

  Silence.

  “Ryan?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Just breathe. We’ll be there soon.”

  Mark’s waiting for me when I pull up to his house. He looks a little worn-out himself, and I can’t help it—I reach out and mess up his floppy, all-American boy hair.

  “Is that really necessary?” he asks, but I can tell that he didn’t really mind.

  “Where does Ryan live?”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s where we’re headed.”

  “You know,” Mark says, “there’s this thing called ‘first period’? And then this other thing called ‘first period on the second to last school day of the year’?”

  “Address,” I say.

  “Howard Street. Behind the Seven-Eleven.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s this about?” he asks as I drive.

  “You’d know if you turned on your phone.”

  “Maybe I kept my phone off precisely so that I wouldn’t have to know.”

  “Then you should be happy that he called me so that I could tell you this: Your friend needs you. It might not be fair. It might really suck, because you’ve needed him and he’s been off slip-dip-dripping with a college boy—”

  “Don’t forget mortar-pestling.”

  “Oh, I haven’t. Nor have I forgotten rearranging the universe—”

  “—with their bodies—”

  “—which last time I checked is a pretty big accomplishment. I mean, not just anyone can do that.”

  “Apparently not me,” he says. “Or else Ryan wouldn’t have had to trade me in for his erotic poet.”

  “Nope,” I say. “No time for self-pity this morning. You have some rescuing to do. Which house?”

  “The blue one.”

  I pull over. I turn off the Jeep and turn to Mark.

  “He sounds like shit,” I say. “It sounds serious. I’m gonna be right here. Let me know if you need me.”

  Mark takes a breath. Shakes his head. I can tell he really doesn’t want to do this, but he gets out of the Jeep anyway. I expect him to knock, but he turns the knob and lets himself into the house, and yeah, that makes sense. Because up until a few days ago, nothing was wrong between them—not on the surface, anyway. A few days ago, Mark was a quiet kid in my math class, a blur of motion in the outfield at the one baseball game I ever attended. So much can change in a few days, even in a few hours. I’ve brought him here to face the change head-on and I know I’m going to have to face it, too.

  I’m not running away from anything anymore.

  It’s a promise I’m making to myself.

  You can keep doing what you’re supposed to, what you’re expected to, and tell yourself it’s what you want. Sit with the same people at lunch, pretending you still have things in common. Read the shiny college brochures, go on the tours, buy into the myth that one of them is meant for you. Believe, at eighteen, that you know what your life will hold and how to prepare for it.

  But if you don’t really believe it, if all that time you’re harboring a doubt so deep it creeps into even your best moments, and you break the rules and step away, then there’s going to be a reckoning. You are going to have to explain yourself.

  As I sit in the driveway and wait, last night rushes back, takes me over. I’m sitting in that uncomfortable chair, already wrecked by Quinn’s poem, by Ryan’s exit, by Mark’s defeat. And now here’s Lehna.

  “I don’t usually write poetry,” she says. “But I had this in my journal from the other night and I figured, I don’t know, why not.”

  She blinks against the lights into the audience. “Go, Lehna!” Violet shouts. June and Uma wave with great enthusiasm. But I just watch her, bracing myself for what might come.

  “Okay,” she says. “Here it goes.”

  We were swimming downstream, always.

  We were all scales and fins,

  all gleaming in the sun,

  all carefree and careless.

  We never had to try hard

  or even try at all.

  You and me,

  me and you,

  and the water,

  and the sun.

  Or, no.

  What we really were,

  were twins.

  The kind that feel it

  when the other is cold.

  The kind that always hears

  two heartbeats

  instead of one.

  Pinch me

  and you’d say

  ouch.

  Or maybe

  I imagined all of it:

  the water,

  the sun,

  even our scales and fins.

  Maybe it was just circumstance

  and nothing profound

  or anomalous

  or even

  unusual,

  the way you’d eat a strawberry

  and I’d say

  yum.

  Because all it took

  was for you to step away

  for me to hear

  a single heartbeat.

  It was always

  just me.

  It was always

  just you.

  We thought we were special,

  but we were always

  the subjects

  of two separate

  sentences.

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s it.”

  And I know things happened after that. The rise of applause, everyone’s teary eyes. Mark leaning over to me, saying, “Wow. So she is human.” Violet’s questioning look and whatever it is I must have told her. But everything that happened after, it was a blur, because all I remember is Lehna, blinking into the bright light, and the way it sank into me, burrowing, festering: Whatever this is that’s happening between us, it’s another part of the tower that I have to burn down.

  19

  MARK

  I dare you.

  Why do we think this is okay? Why do we always feel the need to push and push and push? Don’t we know that pushing is never a way to get a person to come closer?

  And yet.

  There is something powerful about the shedding of comfort. There is something intense about feeling that person push, knowing that the force behind it is the force of their caring, of their genuine belief that the push will get you to a better place.

  I’m not ready.

  As I’m walking up the stairs to Ryan’s room, I’m thinking the only real response to this statement could be:

  Who is?

  * * *

  He’s still in his pajamas. Which isn’t fair, because in Ryan’s case pajamas means boxers and a ratty old Queen Amidala T-shirt that is much sexier than any late-nineties relic should ever be.

  But that’s not what’s being drawn into my focus. What I’m seeing is a boy so lost in the world that he can’t get himself out of bed. The tiredness from lack of sleep, the tiredness of too many thoughts without hitting on the right one. He looks like a balloon that once touched the ceiling brightly but now, weeks later, stumbles along the floor.

  “Thanks for coming,” he says. And the fact that he feels the need to thank me makes me sad. It should be understood that I would be here, that I will always be here.

  “I know it’s ridiculous,” he goes on. “The timing, I mean. For fuck’s sake, there are only two days left in school. You would have thought I could’ve stayed in the closet for two more days. But no. That, apparently, was not the plan.”

  “So this is it?” I ask. “Today’s the day?”

  He pats a space next to him on the bed, then clutches a pillow to his chest. I sit down where he’s gestured me to sit, facing him.

  “Today has been the day for a very long time,” he tells me. “Today has been something I’ve told myself often without ever really believing it. But this week—today actually became today. No more looking at a wall and pretending it was a mirror. No more shelving the fiction in th
e nonfiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it was Taylor who called my bluff. With you and me, the secrecy was part of the story—at least the way I was writing it. I know you would have written it differently. But with me and him—I had to leave the world I’d created. I had to walk into the world that really was. The feelings I’m feeling—they are not tomorrow feelings. They’re today feelings. With you and me—it’s just so…”

  “Complicated?” I volunteer.

  “Yeah. Complicated. Can I tell you another thing you don’t want to hear?”

  “Sure.”

  “If I hadn’t seen you up there on that bar—I never would have had the courage to talk to Taylor. To dance with him. To let all this happen. You gave me the inspiration I needed. Part of it was competition, I’m sure—you did that thing so I had to do something even riskier. But part of it was sheer admiration. So I flirted with him so openly—and doing that made me realize what open felt like. I got to that point. I’m at that point. Now I just have to figure out the other ninety-nine percent of it. And you know what? That other ninety-nine percent is fucking scary.”

  I nod. It is.

  I see how truly terrified he is. In a twisted way, I am glad that I am part of it. And in an equally twisted way, I am sad that I am only a part of it and not all of it.

  But that is not what this is about.

  I know that is not what this is about.

  My heart goes out to him, but in a different way from before. It used to want affection. Attention. Recognition.

  Now it just wants for him to find his way. And it knows that his way and mine might not be the same.

  I know him well. There was a blind spot in my knowing. But now I’m looking around it. I am knowing him more truthfully.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and what he’s apologizing for is the fact that he’s upset, that I am seeing him upset. He knows me well, too.

  “There’s no need to be,” I assure him.

  Now he says something else—another kind of apology. “I really like him.”

  “That’s okay. Really, it is.”

  I look at him in his Star Wars T-shirt and anchor-print boxers, clutching a pillow on this bed we have spent so much of our time in, and what I realize is that somehow, without even knowing it, I have stepped out of love with him, and where I’ve stepped instead may end up being the better place. I have to step out of love with him, because the ground I’ve always wanted to be there was never really there. He is capable of giving that ground, but I am not the one he wants to give it to. Instead I have the ground we’ve grown all these years. I love him indestructibly, and I care about him at a root level, but in this three-breath-long moment I can understand that the two of us will never be boyfriends, never be husbands, never be everything to each other in that way. I can let that go, and hold tight to everything else.