The Inside of Out

by Jenn Marie Thorne

  “There.” I nodded at the wall. “My masterpiece.”

  We sat staring at a largely blank cement block wall, where on one side, what used to sort of be a whale was now half-covered in messy strokes of blue paint. The can was still there, but had gotten overturned. I’d have to clean up the sidewalk now too.

  “I can see it,” Adam said, and I shot him a dubious look. He laughed, squinted. “I mean, it takes some concentration, but yeah. The sky, with a blimp. And there at the bottom, that’s the land, right? It’ll take some work, but it’ll be great.”

  My groan turned into a laugh. “It’s Atlantis.”

  He frowned. “I’m sorry?”

  “The whale is too distracting, I’m taking it out, but the outline you can see there around the edge—it’s all going to be the Lost Continent of Atlantis.”

  “Wow.” Adam rested an arm on the steering wheel. “The Lost Continent of Atlantis. Like . . . the whole thing? An entire mythical continent? In one mural?”

  I shrugged. “A panorama. A sweeping view, angled so you can see the destruction, the coral growing where buildings once stood. The breaching whale was meant to create a sense of perspective from the top of the ocean to the bottom, so the continent feels just out of reach, glimmering under the surface. And . . . yeah.”

  “Jesus,” Adam said, blinking dizzily. “Atlantis. Not an abstract mural, not a picture of kids holding hands . . . a mythical continent. You plan big, don’t you?”

  “Gargantuan,” I said, feeling the opposite of gargantuan as I stared at the mess of paint marring the rec center wall.

  “Why don’t you . . . ?” He winced like he knew I wouldn’t like what he was going to say. “Change it to something easier?”

  I was too tired to feel offended. “Hannah suggested the same thing.”

  He raised his eyebrows and I shook my head.

  “It isn’t my vision. I didn’t want to paint any mural. I wanted to paint this mural. There was a little kid here who loved Atlantis more than anything and . . . I wanted to make it happen. Make it real. I wanted to make the most incredible mural he’d ever seen.” I rubbed my eyes. “The funny thing is, I don’t even remember the kid’s name.”

  Adam was watching me.

  “You think I sound arrogant, don’t you?” I glanced away. “It’s okay, I can take it.”

  “No.” He pushed his glasses up, considering. “Not arrogant. More . . . self-defeating. Why does it have to be perfect? Nothing’s perfect, Daisy. Not even Atlantis.” He grinned. “Especially not Atlantis. That place used to be cool, I guess, but it’s a total dump these days.”

  I laughed, leaning against the window, sifting through his words. Self-defeating. Huh.

  “Seriously, Daisy, name me one perfect thing.”

  Catching his eye, I thought of an answer right away—and blushed like a lunatic. Then I turned away with a smirk. “The mozzarella sticks at the Moonlight Coffee Shop. Crisp. Golden . . .”

  “Aha,” he said, pointing at me. “But the coffee is an abomination. This is my point. There’s always going to be something crappy you have to navigate to find your way to something amazing.”

  “Crappy,” I repeated, staring at the wall. “Well, I’ve got that step covered.” Then, with my next blink, the wall transformed.

  I felt for the door handle. “The thing is—I really can see it.”

  Adam followed as I got out of the car.

  “There’s the temple to the gods,” I said, pointing through the fence to a brick on the bottom left of the wall. “And there’s the grand corridor that all the tall ships used to pass through on their way to the center of the island. And there, that’s the toppled statue of Poseidon, being pulled back up by mermaids.”

  I blinked and it was gone. Just a collection of smears.

  “It sounds beautiful,” Adam said.

  “There’s just one problem.” I pointed to myself with my thumb.

  He opened his mouth. I cut him off.

  “Raina was right. I’m unqualified.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything. I can’t paint. I can’t compose music . . .”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “. . . I can’t speak to gay issues, because I’m not gay. I’m not anything.”

  “You spoke to them well, I thought,” Adam said. “Considering.”

  “They’re way better off without me.”

  Adam’s eyes drifted to the wall. “I’m not so sure about that. Have you been watching the news?”

  “I peeked at CNN yesterday. They had a ticker that said ‘Daisy’s Gay Hoax,’ so I turned it off.”

  “I would have too. Honestly, watching how you’ve been treated over the past few days has really soured me on journalism. Nobody seems at all interested in getting your side of the story. All they want to report on is that Beck woman and her quest to shut it down.”

  I shook my head, reality seeping in. “How, though? The ‘fire risk’ thing? That seems so flimsy.”

  “They’re saying if the event has more than twelve hundred guests, they’re shutting it down.”

  “Twelve hundred?” There were more than thirteen hundred students at Palmetto alone. And this wasn’t just for them anymore. It was for America.

  “The worst part is, the news is reporting it like it’s a good thing,” Adam said, squinting into the sunrise. “They’ve turned against it and I have no idea why. I’m trying to counter as best I can with my blog posts, but oh my God, the comments underneath.” He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, then shot me a tight smile. “Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot about avoiding comment sections in the past few weeks.”

  “Is this because of me?” I said quietly. “Because I screwed it up?”

  Hannah’s words echoed in my head, “Everything will always be all about you.” I closed my eyes, wincing.

  Adam sighed. “I think this whole event needed a face—one person to rally around. And now it’s just got that actor guy popping up to say how awesome America’s Homecoming is going to be. He’s not a teenager. He plays one on TV, but . . . it’s not enough.”

  A face, a teenager to rally around. Someone telegenic. Someone actually gay.

  Player One is not the hero.

  Adam squirmed and I realized I’d been staring. “Just my early-morning ramblings. I’m sure it’s all going fine, Daisy, it’s the coffee talking and the fact that the sun just came up, and—”

  His glasses had slipped and I couldn’t resist—I pushed them back into place. My fingers grazed his cheek and his hand darted up to catch mine and kept it there. Inside those black frames, his eyes ignited.

  He was going to kiss me. This was unambiguous. It was going to happen.

  “Daisy,” he mumbled, and inched closer.

  I could have stayed there and let it happen, enjoyed it happening, closed my eyes or whatever you do and forgotten everything but him. But the sun was bright now and I had been awake for a very long time and what I wanted in this moment, more than anything, was to let Adam see me.

  So I leaned away. “Can I tell you something? Off the record?”

  He froze, listening. Here went nothing.

  “Hannah’s . . . my person.”

  Adam nodded, having heard this before, but there was a new cloud of confusion in his eyes. I kept going quickly so he didn’t get the wrong impression.

  “I’m starting to realize that this is not a good thing. The truth is, for two years, I didn’t have any friends. I went to the nurse’s office every day of fourth grade in case there was some medical condition I didn’t know about that would let me go home early. I did have imaginary friends. Stede Bonnet was one. We went on adventures. There was Table the Table, my dining room table. He’d ask me about my day when I got in. Grog the Dinosaur was another close confidant. I kept him in the closet
so Mom wouldn’t hear us talking. I tried to be best friends with my cat, which is more normal, but she hated me too. Still does, actually.”

  My legs had started to shake, so I sank into a crouch, but kept going. I needed to get this out.

  “And then I met Hannah and everything was okay for a while. Better than okay. She saved me. Our friendship canceled out everything that happened before. But now it seems to be over, so I’m back to being the real me and . . . I just thought you should know who that was. I’m not the girl from the article. I’m not someone who can lead a charge and Do Great Things. I’m somebody who gets scared . . .” I smeared a tear away with my wrist. “. . . and flies under the radar. Doesn’t make new friends. Clings to what’s safe. But then I’m also someone who gets these ideas. Continent-sized ideas. And once they’re there, I can’t stop myself from chasing them—I’m like a . . . a dog, running after a car, realizing five blocks down that it was horrible idea and I need to go back home.”

  Adam laughed. I kept going.

  “I fall on my face a lot. Like, literally. I say inappropriate things. I hurt feelings. I’m not brave, I’m not talented, I’m not together, I’m just . . .” I breathed in. “Me.”

  And with that last word, all my confidence vanished, leaving me flapping like a loose sail on a dead-calm sea.

  I should have just let him kiss me.

  I started to turn, drifting off to wreck on some sandbank—but he reached out and drew me in.

  “No, Daisy.” Adam’s hands slid from my elbows to my wrists. “You don’t get it. I’m sorry all that happened to you, but I knew who you were from the moment I met you. And okay, I might have fudged a few details in that article.” He let go. “That was about me, not you. My ambition, I guess. Being a little too in love with my ability to bend the narrative, and . . . a whole host of other things I’m not going to go into now. I shouldn’t have done it. It was lying by omission and it set you on a course for disaster. But in my defense . . . you make a terrible headline.”

  I peered up at him through stinging eyes. He grinned.

  “You’re . . . an experimental novel. An epic poem in Aramaic. The compiled lyrics of Sonic Youth.”

  “I have no idea whether you’re complimenting me.”

  “I’m saying you’re amazing, Daisy.” Adam moved away, sticking his hands in his pockets as if embarrassed by the admission.

  Heat swept my skin. “Oh.”

  “You were probably amazing as a kid too,” he said, rolling a pebble with the toe of his black sneakers. “Going on adventures with pirates? What were the other kids doing? Playing foursquare? Trading stickers? I’d pick pirates too.”

  “You’re just saying that to be nice,” I said, mostly to hide my growing flush at the thought of Adam on a pirate ship, his glasses framing an eye-patch.

  “I’m not really the ‘saying it to be nice’ type.” He glanced over his shoulder at a passing car. “What I’m actually saying is that I understand. When Eli got heavy into music, he completely ditched me. Took our entire social group with him too. I was so thrown that I wasn’t even sure what the mechanics were of making friends anymore. By the time I got to high school, I’d decided I was some kind of iconoclast, that nobody would ever understand me. A Byronic hero.” He winced at the memory. “So I skipped the high school stuff. I had friends. Not close ones. I’ve hardly kept in touch with them since I got down here.”

  “But you’ve made college friends, right?” I nudged his knee with mine.

  He laughed, eyes dancing over our knees, nudging back. “Actually, you were kind of spot on with the whole ‘friends your own age’ dig.”

  I shuffled back a step.

  “I’ve sort of fallen into the same trap as before,” he said. “Flying under the radar, as you said. Focusing on my work—among other distractions.”

  His grin rose slowly, one side of his mouth, then the other.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For relating. For not making fun of me.”

  “Never,” he said. “Well, I shouldn’t promise that. I promise not to make fun of you when it matters, how about that?”

  “Deal.”

  We shook, and hesitated, our fingers comfortable against each other’s. But it wasn’t that moment. We were alert again. Cautious. The time for kissing had passed.

  We didn’t talk much on the way home. Even when we got to my driveway and parked, Adam gazed over his glasses out the windshield, lost in thought. It didn’t feel right to blurt “Thanks for the ride” and dash into the house after everything that had happened, so I held my breath and touched his shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  He startled. “Yeah. I just . . .” A hint of a smile lit his face. “I need to call my brother.”

  Not what I’d expected. “Yeah. You should.”

  “And you should go to homecoming, Daisy.” His voice had an intense edge.

  I shook my head at my lap. “They don’t want me there.”

  “I think you’re wrong. I think a lot of people appreciate what you’ve done, straight or not. You’ve helped make this happen and you need to be there to see it take shape.”

  “I’ll take your advice under consideration.”

  “Plus I’ll be there, and I’ll want one more interview.”

  “I’ll give you an exclusive,” I promised, and saw him beaming from the driver’s seat as I made my reluctant way to my front door. Before I went inside, I watched him roll away, mentally mapping the distance—twenty yards, fifty yards, rounding the corner—like the numbers could rationalize away this twinge in my chest.

  When I crept into the house, by some sort of miracle, my parents were still asleep. I made it up to my bedroom, tried without success to scrub the paint off my wrist and face and crawled into bed, exhausted to the point of thought-annihilation.

  It seemed like I’d only closed my eyes for a second when a sound from downstairs jolted me awake.

  Glass breaking. My father, screaming.

  I fell out of bed and raced to the stairs just in time to see my mom sprint from her bedroom, equally terrified.

  Did someone throw a brick through our window?

  I was just about to yell “Call 911!” my feet thundering on the hardwood as I skipped the last three steps, when I caught sight of my parents standing in the living room. The windows were fine. The news was on. And a mug of coffee was shattered on the floor in front of Dad’s feet.

  “This is our Daisy?” He was pointing at the screen and yelling. “They’re talking about our Daisy on Morning Joe?”

  “Still? Ugh.” Mom crouched to clean up the mess with a dustpan and brush.

  “‘Still’?” Dad’s face went crimson. “How long have they been . . . ?”

  He caught sight of me and his face returned to sickly white.

  I waved. “How does he not know?”

  Mom winced a smile and kept cleaning. “It’s been a busy few weeks.”

  “I knew there was a club you were in and . . . buh . . . guh . . . you were throwing a party,” Dad sputtered.

  “All accurate so far,” I said.

  “I knew you were on the local news for it . . .” He waved wildly to the corner of the living room where we’d taped the Shawna Wells interview.

  “Oh dear,” Mom said quietly.

  “I didn’t know they were talking about it all over the goddamn country!” He turned and pointed three times at the TV. “And is that Cindy Beck?”

  “Ugh,” Mom repeated. “Yes.”

  I crept closer for confirmation. Yep, there she was in her cute pastel sweater set, sitting on a round sofa with the morning show hosts like they were old pals.

  “More than anything, it’s sad,” she was saying. “I’m sad to see what’s happening to this country.”

  The female anchor leaned over and touched her hand. I had to turn aw
ay to keep from vomiting.

  “Do I need to go and have words with Walter?” Dad’s chest was doing its best to puff.

  “No,” Mom and I said together, but she had this look in her eye like she and Dad were going to start making out the second I left the room.

  “You know . . .” Cindy Beck’s tittering laughter rang out over the chatter of the hosts. “I really believe they are going to wind up being hoisted by their own petards.”

  We all stared at the screen.

  Mom was the first to laugh. “Did she just—?”

  “That can’t be how you pronounce that.” I let out a giggle.

  “Pee-tards,” Dad said. “Pee. Tards.”

  “Can you fill him in?” I whispered to Mom, ducking back into the hallway. “I’m going back to bed.”

  She nodded, but Dad jogged up the stairs to intercept me just as I pulled up the covers.

  “Daisy.” He leaned against the doorway, huffing from the climb. “I’ve been thinking and—I’m gonna take some time off from consulting. A month. Mom and I are going to draw up a business plan, get the ball rolling on some new ideas, but . . . mostly I’m going to be around. And, ah . . .” He scratched his stubble. “Paying better attention. Whenever you want to talk about anything—I’m here. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great,” I said, smiling, then tugged the covers all the way over my head as the door shut quietly behind him.

  Sure, he was here. Today, anyway. Maybe even for the next full month—until he poured himself into creating the next great imaginary universe and forgot all about the real one again, along with all the people populating . . .

  Startled, I blinked alert, staring at the tiny pinpricks of sunlight sifting through my comforter.

  Privilege? I thought.

  Maybe. Or maybe just a blessing I’d been too whiny to count. I had two parents who loved me. Who tried. Hannah didn’t even have a father in her life, just a single parent in stubborn denial about what her daughter was going through. And then there was Natalie—with a harpy of a right-wing nut job mother currently holding court on Fox News, and a father who seemed to want to help but was painfully out of his depth.